Some Great English Novels (1926)

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SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

OTHER WORKS BY THE
AUTHOR

LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN
RICKMAN

VIE DE BOHEME: A PATCH OF
ROMANTIC PARIS
THE ESSAY
GIOSUE CARDUCCI
THE GOOD ENGLISHWOMAN
CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE

FOR CHILDREN ,
THREE NAUGHTY CHILDREN

SOME GREAT
ENGLISH NOVELS

Studies in the Art of Fiction

BY

ORLO WILLIAMS, M.C.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1926

•Copyright

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

A

CARLO LINATI

ACUTISSIMO CRITICO DI LETTERATURA INGLESE
IN TESTIMONIANZA DI VIVA AMICIZIA
E DI

SIMPATIA INTELLETTUALE * ^ .

FOREWORD

This book was conceived under the title of
“ Old Enchantments ”; and that title, though
abandoned, would have had a reference to my
purpose. To go back to old enchantments is a
very pleasant act, yet how idly, how passively,
do we usually make this return ! If the enchant¬
ment, especially, be a book, we take it to a
comfortable chair or a shady bank and let its
familiar magic charm us in delightful languor,
forgetting the shock, the tension, the total
absorption of our first submission. Too often
we keep our alertness for the present, and look
to the past only for relaxation.

Some early enthusiasms, that will not stand
retrospective criticism, were obviously imper¬
fect, as each of us must confess; but, as a rule,
if we take the trouble, we shall find, on second
reading, how little of a great work of art we
had at first taken in.

In an age when the output of new and
interesting books is so vast, a critic, above all,
needs no little resolution if his return to older

. vii

^ii FOREWORD

,|vorks is to be more than a cursory glance.
My own primary impulse has been fortified by
a secondary purpose—that of getting away
from commonplace historical retrospect. The
general criticism of individual authors’ works
as a whole, throughout all but the latest stages
of our literature, is abundant; historical
developments have been adequately worked
out; but little space or attention is devoted to
the appreciation of single works, and that is a
real business of criticism.

I hope that these studies are neither sterile
nor negative. Mr. Percy Lubbock’s admirable
book The Craft of Fiction has shown how illumin¬
ating discussions of this kind can be : certainly
they call into play all a critic’s concentration,
besides exposing all his weaknesses. More¬
over, painters copy old masterpieces to probe
the secrets of their craft, and I suggest that
both novelists and critics would learn some¬
thing if they sometimes imitated the painters
by patiently transcribing some old master¬
piece of literature. However, if life is too
short for this practice, there is no excuse for
neglecting an exercise analogous to the intense 1
concentration of a painter or a sculptor upon
the single work of a master.

The two last chapters, which are ip

FOREWORD

ix

the nature of appendages, appeared in the
London Mercury. I express my obligations
to Mr. H. Festing Jones, Messrs. Jonathan
Gape, Messrs. Heinemann, and Messrs.
Longmans, Green and Co., for permission
to quote extensively from copyright works.

Orlo Williams

16 Aubrey Walk, W. 8.

March ig26.

CONTENTS

I AGI

Foreword ...... vii

I. Tom Jones (Fielding)'--.. . . i

II.c Martin Ghuzzlewit (Dickens) . . 26

III. Pendennis (Thackeray) . . . 53

IV. The Egoist (George Meredith) , . 84

V. Roxana (Defoe) . . . . .120

VL Emma (Jane Austen) . . . 149

VII. Adam Bede (George Eliot) . • T 79

VIII. The Way of all Flesh (Samuel Butler) 205

IX. The Novels of William de Morgan . 235

X. A Little Classic (Edith Somervtlle

and Martin Ross) .... 264

xi

SOME GREAT ENGLISH
NOVELS

i

TOM JONES

“For my own part, when I seek t© analyse
the impression left upon my mind by Tom
Jones, 1 feel no impulse to compare it with any
other book, but rather there rises before my
eyes a vision of one of the great ships of old
ploughing with spread sails and laden hold
over a sunlit sea. The winds blow fair, and
from her deck, as she speeds upon her way, the
deep voices of sailors fling to the air some lusty
old chantey, simple and victorious.'’

In these words M. Aurelien Digeon, an
intelligent Frenchman of our own day, writing
in praise of Fielding,* opens his chapter on
Tom Jones. One might hold that the applica¬
tion of such an image to so profoundly

The Novels of Fielding , by Aurelien Digeon : Rout-
ledge, 1925.

B

2

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

unnautical a book was inappropriate, but one
cannot deny the power of the image to evoke
response, especially in the mind of an English¬
man.^ - M. Digeon—well aware of his act, we
may be sure—appeals to emotion before he
proceeds to criticism, and he skilfully chooses
the vehicle of his appeal. Few could resist it.
A whole anthology of English prose and poetry
might be compiled to illustrate that manifold
and ever-fresh quality of beauty which has
been ascribed to a full-rigged ship, with all sails
set, ploughing her dazzling furrow through a
sunlit sea. It is our delight in the harmonious
proportion between hull and canvas, in the
trimness of the sails and the curve of the bow,
in majestic, easy motion over a moving surface,
in the contrast of bright and sparkling colours,
and in the more general ideas of freedom,
nobility, contentment and work well done
which makes our response so easy, so impera¬
tive. fine ship in a fair breeze—happy is
the author whose book can leave so vivid an
image in a reader’s mind: he may feel indeed
that he has fulfilled his purpose.’*.'As the
psychologists say, it is an emotive, not a
logical, judgment; but it is none the worse
for that.

The image does not matter so much as the

3

TOM JONES

feeling which aroused it—the feeling of excite¬
ment and exceptional well-being which in a
happy moment attends the contemplation of a
successful work of art. The presence of some
such feeling, which is different from a drowsed
satisfaction or the mere appeasement of a
desire, is a sign that the artist, with his book,
his poem, his picture or his piece of music, has
communicated to us something, at all events,
of his artistic idea: its absence, correspondingly,
proves that, though he may have interested or
amused us, he has failed'fljJMiis main purpose.';
The failure, of course, may be of ourselves or
of the particular moment: upon the eve of
execution or in tho throes of toothache a man
might be obdurate to the poetry of Shakespeare
or the music of Beethoven. But, given a
situation of bodily ease and an attention alert
but pliant, this familiar but peculiar felicity is
what we expect from a work of art. x It is a
criterion of the enjoyment of art, if not of art
itself, -x'.

^Certainly, if the reading of such a book as
Tqm Jones—oac conceived on so large a scale, i
so dramatically" constructed, so vivid in its ^
portraiture and so strong in its mental frame-
workj-were not attended, at its close, by a
feeling akin to M. Digeon’s, one would have

4

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

to diagnose a failure somewhere, either in;
Fielding or his reader, and look about for its ( ?
causes. Time, however, has already shown
that Tom Jones succeeds in the majority of
cases, though not always so overwhelmingly:*'
Certain temperaments have been antagonised
by its so-called “ coarseness ” or “ vulgarity ”;
other temperaments have found it common¬
place and at the level, as a modern writer has
put it, of after-dinner speaking. t Bjut the
majority of readers and, I think, of good
critics, after following the rich and comic
history to its end, will close the last volume
with some mental ejaculation of “ splendid! ”
or “ magnificent! though they may have
been forced to make criticisms in detail or
even extensive reservations. After . all, . you
may .thrill tothe sight of a ship and yet not
care for the cut of her jib. ^Thackeray, for
instance, thought that Tom Jones himself
smelt a little too strong for Sophia’s drawing¬
room, in spite of the rankness to which Squire
Western hkd accustomed that dutiful young
woman; but this was only Thackeray’s way
of complaining that the reader’s legitimate
sentiments towards a hero of romance and his
consent to such a hero’s living happily ever
afterwards with the lovely heroine should be

TOM JONES 5

claimed for a sensual and lusty child of nature
whose fastidiousness was anything but remark¬
able. JTp w a<; angry with Jones: “ too much'
of the plum cake and rewards of life fall to
that boisterous, swaggering young scapegrace,”
he said. Yet his ejaculations of general
admiration are almost breathless.

v

“ What a genius! What a bright-eyed intel¬
ligence and observation ! What a wholesome j
hatred for meanness and knavery! What a
vast sympathy! What a cheerfulness! What
a manly relish for life! What a love of human
kind! What a poet is here!—watching, medi¬

tating, brooding, creating! What multitudesl
of truth has that man left behind him ! What'

generations he has taught to laugh wisely and
fairly! What scholars he has formed and
accustomed to the exercise of thoughtful
humour and the manly play of wit! ” .* •

Each one of us will be conscious of similar

oppositions: even M. Digeon thirlks the ad-'
mirably told story of the Man on the Hill is
dreary and out of place, and that the char¬
acter of the hypocritical Blifil, compared with
Moliere’s Tartuffe, is something of a failure.

These oppositions, these internal protests of

6 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

the mind, are as interesting and as important
as the broad assents which seem to overwhelm
them. ^ Tom Jones is nearly two hundred years
old, and it has held its place. We may take
the broad assents, with the small percentage
of broad dissents, for granted. Tom Jones is a
masterpiece, Fielding is a great novelist, and
so forth. It is unnecessary either to compete
with or qualify the ecstatic final periods of
Thackeray’s lecture. Each of us can decide
for himself to how many marks of exclamation
his own emotion will run; and indeed, if they
were all removed and direct speech substituted
for rhetorical apostrophe, Thackeray’s out¬
burst would be almost unassailable as a cold
statement of fact. '*■

Upon broad assents of this nature many
minds seem to meet and, if ever, achieve the
apparent impossibility of thinking the same
thoughts; and it is often supposed to be the
fur.»:tion of criticism to pave the way to them.
Nc' doubt the connection of a number of par¬
ticular critical judgments into an organised
system is a highly useful, and very difficult,
thing to do; it is the evidence and test of good
taste. But if the unity of organisation were-'
reached at the price of eliminating all smaller
distinctions, the value of the result would be

TOM JONES 7

doubtful. For example, Stendhal’s La Char¬
treuse de Parme, Dostoievsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov, and Tom Jones are by general
consent great works of art by great writers;
but assent to this proposition might be, though
genuine, of so vague a character that it would
possess hardly any critical value at all. The
really valuable feat of criticism—one that only
a mind of the highest order could adequately
accomplish—would be to correlate the ex¬
periences of reading these three books into an
intelligible system, while fully appreciating and
exposing the salient and manifold differences
that distinguished them. A lesser mind, aware
of all that such a task implied, might well
shrink from it, given that, in the particular
instance, he admired all three novels; the
inevitable differences in the quality of his
admirations alone would be the most baffling
things to describe clearly. His emotional
attitude in one case might be overwhelming;
in another his admiration might be alri(ost
cold; yet he might be constrained, on reflec¬
tion, to hold the second work more valuable
than the first. Such a mind, which is all that
the writer can lay claim to, may justifiably
hesitate before it attempts the final reconcili¬
ation, and may possibly contribute more

8

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

valuably to the subject if it stops short at
recording the oppositions and the conflicts of
one particular experience. It is possible,
moreover, that the mere recording of them
may bring into prominence the particular
quality in this particular book which at the
end resolves all conflicts and prompts sincere
admiration.

^ Th e fact is tha t, while ready to subscribe to ,
any reasoned panegyric of Tom Jones , Tpreferj
to it all the other three of Fielding’s novels,
Joseph Andrews for the portrait of Parson
Adams, Jonathan Wild for the sustained and
brilliant irony, and Amelia for its progress to
a far more interesting analysis of character
than appears in any of its predecessors. >$4f it
be true that Amelia was Fielding’s favourite,
his preference is intelligible, for in that book .
without losing his masterly hold upon human

S ners. he was closing a powerful grip upon
more mysterio us a nd more e x citing organ -
_ the human mind. The reasons for these
preferences are , pe r haps ,~~worth_ amplifying,
since th ey a re concerned with some of the chief
grounds upon which nov els are praised or*
b lame d/ To begin with, the creation of a
type-character, lovingly remembered and

TOM JONES 9

identified by generations of readers, if it
embodies a mere eccentricity as do Lewis
Carroll’s comic Mad Hatter or Dickens’ in¬
human Quilp, may not always have a high
artistic merit, but when it has verisimilitude
and broad proportions it is always a notable
performance. Had he written nothing else
Fielding would have been remembered for
Parson Adams as Manzoni for Don Abbondio,
the cowardly but human village priest of his
only novel. This power of enshrining in one
fictitious person the comedy and tragedy of
some common human failing or impulse, or
the glory of some generally prized nobility
of mind, seems to have most belonged
to the greatest writers of drama and
fictio& r "

Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Tartuffe, Fal-
|iStaff, Uncle Toby, Jer ome Coignard are
/triumphs of the imagination; and, to the
common reader, at all events, in nothing stoes
Shakespeare seem so strikingly to transcUnd
the dramatists of his day than in this suprebae
plastic gift, ynis great characters are like
moulds of a m astef-craftsfnan which indelibly
stamp the fluid impressions of reader after
reader into imperishable forms. This gift is
not by any means the whole of dramatic

IO SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

excellence, it is true, yet how compelling it is!
For one Rosalind or one Beatrice I would give
thousand Millamants.

\ F ield i ng’s P arson Adams belongs to th e class^
or these g reat fo r ms, on the level of Uncle Toh y
and the V icar of Wakefield. Once, we have
receive^the impression of this character com-,,
pounded of extreme benevolence, unworldli-i
nessj^absent-mindedness and harmless vanity ,j
we cannot lose it: it remains with us always,
comic yet Beautiful. I can find no character in
Tom Jones which makes so deep an impression,
except Squire Western. This is not in the
least a complaint that the moulding of charac¬
ter in Tom Jones is weak: on the contrary, 1
many of the characters, major and minor—
the hero, Squire Allworthy, Mrs. Honour,
Partridge, the lieutenant, the puppet showman,
Lady Bellaston—are clear and memorable.
Yt r better and deeper-cut forms of nearly all
th fj' types exist elsewhere. Sophia herself
wil^all her independent, brave maidenhood
fa/es^ before Rosalind. Inqui re W estern, to my
hund, little as one can love him, stands out
above them'all as something supremely well
done. Fielding has neither idealised nor de¬
graded him: he holds him up, neither for
admiration nor derision, but for understanding,

TOM JONES it

as the complete portrait of a boorish squire
belonging to that state of society which, with
so boundless a jaagnanimity, he understood
and criticised.Vrrom the moment when the
squire is first introduced with the demure,
ironic description of his typical afternoon:
s'*' It was Mr. Western’s custom every after¬
noon, as soon as he was drunk, to hear his
daughter play on the harpsichord; for he was
a great lover of music, and perhaps, had he
lived in town, might have passed for a con¬
noisseur; for he always excepted against the
finest compositions of Mr. Handel . . .” to his
uproarious whisper: “so much the better for

Tom; for d-n me if he shan’t ha’ the

tousling her,” he dominates the stage and,
enlivens the action upon every appearance.'
'The speeches from his foul lips, whether he be
wrangling with his sister-in-law or devotedly
abusing Sophia, have a ’natural forced and
inte nsity far above those of the other characters.
Brutal, coarse, tyrannical, selfish, but .neither
a boob y, an idiot nor a coward, choleric Wt
affec tionate, boisterous in friendship, violent
in oppo sition, powerful of hand bu^ weak of
argument, ..drunken, muscular, lurid of speech,
Squire Western is imperisha ble} though his
living counterparts are happily few. Other

tz

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

hands, Moliere, Congreve, have essayed this
type, but none have fashioned it with Fielding’s*
roundne ss .and . vigour* And yet I cannot
pl3.ce this virtue on the level of that which
makes Parson Adams, into whose fashioning;
has gone a far wider, deeper, truer and more
poetic Combination D f insight and feeling.} A
reader’s response to Squire Western, rich as it
will be, must be on a lower level, I think, than
his response to Parson Adams.

>4^As regar ds irony, I need not labour a com¬
parison Between Tom Jones and Jonathan Wild :
the first is , ..the, most purely comic of all
Fielding’s works, but the seconcPlsunq ues¬
ti onably the most brilliant, and^in all our
literature of irony, only Swift’s Tale gf a- Tub
stands abo ve It .~)(Welcnow little of the phases
ofrhind through* which Fielding was passing
when he wrote that astonishing criticism of
human society. M. Digeon seems right in
supposing that it was begun purely as a political
attack on Walpole, but that it was resumed and
completed after Walpole’s fall as something far
deeper and more, universal. We do not love
Jonathan Wild, the book or the character;
indeed, we shiver at what they reveal, for there
is an accomplished and remorseless villain
shown to us acting upon all the motives and

TOM JONES

Jl*

calculations which are generally approved by
the world; but we cannot help being fired by
the indignation in which its indictment was
forged. /Like The Tale of a Tub it is final:
there is no more to be said. The phase of
' mind could not be maintained by a writer
except at die price of silence or mere self¬
imitation. IFielding’s mind was too great to
be confinecr within a single attitude and his
humanity too comprehensive to be stifled by
anger. Jfis bitterness ripened into the mellow-
rfess o f Tom To nes, and in that book_ irony,
instead of'a sharp medicine, becomes but an
ag reeable fla vou r. . Fielding handles It ad¬
mirably always. The Introductory essays jin
1 Tom_ffones —patterns of EnglisJj prose—jJie.
dialogues of Tom Jones with the simpleton
Part ridg e, and the portraits of innkeepers and
their, wives, lawyers, surgeons and other sjelf-
seekers ay. smack pf it delightfully. Witness,
for instance, Partridge’s arguments (Book VIII,
ch. ix) during^~fiis nocturnal walk from
Qloucester with his (master. After advancing
every argument to induce Tom to go back,
and being staggered at finding that he was,
after all, no Jacobite, Partridge will yet not
leave him, since he hugs all the while the
hope of earning Allworthy’s gratitude by

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

bringing him home; and Fielding ends the
chapter with this comment)

“ I am led into this conjecture, by having
remarked, that though love, friendship, esteem,
and such like, have very powerful operations
in the human mind; interest however is an
ingredient seldom omitted by wise men, when
they would work others to their own purposes.
This is indeed a most excellent medicine, and,
like Ward’s pill, flies at once to the particular
part of the body on which you desire to operate,
whether it be the tongue, the hand, or any
other member, where it scarce ever fails of
immediately producing the desired effect^-''

A In fact, throughout Tom Jon es , where it is
not employed in deriding the romantic signs
and delusions of sexual passion, Fielding ’s
irony is copfiped to the co mic .illu minati on;

■ o f~self- i nteres t. The remarks of the puppet 1
showman in Book XII and the conversation
between the landlord, the exciseman, the clerk)
and Partridge on religion which follow show/
with what consummate ease and variety Fiddl¬
ing could treat this the md ) Yet, beside the
terrible thrusts of Jonathan "Wild, these are but
taps of a harlequin’s wand, which tickle the
back but do not transfix the soul.

TOM JONES

^ Writing adm irably^_as alw ays, M. Digeon
says of Amelia : “ The chief and deep beauty
of this novel l i es m its psycho logical realism.
Doubtless this perfectidh can be' explained "By
Fielding’s age and the||greater maturity of his
experience, and also byrthe opportunity, which
his profession as Justice had given him, of
observing the human he art; !” It is the truth,
and it bears witness to another change in
Fielding’s mind which, had he not died in
middle age, might have had still stronger
influence on his art. He was going, in fact,!
in Richardson’s direction, fortified by a farj
wider knowledge and a stronger morality.'
There is no comparison to be drawn between
Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandison, but be¬
tween Amelia and Clarissa Harlowe a telling one
might be possibleicfbelding was reaching into
the depths of the human mind when he wrote J
Amelia, whereas in TmJon^^MM.SQnttnt (
to stay upon jhe^surfece, as befitted the writer
of a " comic, To point this out

implies no adverse criticism of Tom Jones,
though it mawbe an explanation for a personal

preference. Il he— main _characters of_ Tom

Jones a re ii> ybe hxie ^ cbmedy,-. broad an d
typicaT^—the hero is a peiapnificat ion of natural
goodness in a too easily t emp ted body, Sophia

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

is the spirited English maiden, modest but
courageous, Western the boor, .Allwort hy th e
:p rosy be nefa c tor, Mrs. Western the”’scgld,
BUST the spiteful hypocrite and Lady Bellaston

the seductress—th^areji|^i|g .a nd .real . so

. far as they go, but it is only the resource of a
■great author which prevents l mfeir remaining
so constantly ip their character from becomin g
monotonous?^ > The intensity of the action i s
what ca rries them along , not the unravelling
ofTluman complexities for our surprise and
fascination: and that is why, for my own part,
I find a long-windedness in the earlier books,
before the universal hide-and-seek over the
roads and among the inns of England has
begun ^ In spite of Mollv Seagrim and the
mock-Homeric language to which her exploits
inspire her creator, in spite of the truth which
attends every description of Tom’s actions and
reactions, whether moving the skies with his
windy love-rhetoric or retiring into the copse
with Molly on the rebound, and in spite of the
masterly general picture of country life, these
early books are halting intheir ...progress.
Allworthy is a good" old bore; Square and
Thwackum, whose views have now no interest,
are worse ones; and Blifil, without being any
more convincing, is infinitely less entertaining

TOM JONES „£2

than JLJriah Heep. But when once Tom has
been kicked out, and Sophia with Mrs. Honour
decamp, Fielding finds he has no more time
for the philosophical interludes in which these
bores indulge: he becomes excited and adopts
a brisker gait until, by the time the characters
have reached the inn at Upton, he is swinging
his arms and shouting with glee. Exits and
entrances, surprises, fisticuffs, oaths, mock-

heroic descriptions follow one another pell-mell
as if the author were improving out of sheer
enjoyment^ majo r characters are con-'i
cerned withJSHon-alone, and psychology is
reserved for the giving of solidity and colour to

the minor and more casual ones, in shrewd,
swift touches* And in the last volume, where
adventurous vagabondage gives place to the
pleasures and rogueries of London, it is
undoubtedly the complexity of the dramatic
mtngue, and of the suspense in which-fieTsso
cleverly kept, whether Tom Jotfes wffTbsjotscaed
from Lady Bellaston and get his Sop hia /rathe r
than the subtle delineation of Qha&cic r n r
analysis of motive, which delight the,, reader.'

tig^tlystrungan dScj
in new tangles. 2nd it is We sceneWat matters,!

i n ;■ n I f'W- A imtftAiiUrt - - ,-tL

18 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

l aot the motive? If at one time Mrs. Honour
j h as t o hi de m TonTjones’s room from" Lady
1 Bellaslon, at another lit Is fife maid who dis-
)covers the lady in the same embarrassment:
j we laugh at the event and bother little about
[the psychology^ The virtuous maternal out-
' pourings of Mrs. Miller and Tom Jones’s
lectures to his young friend Nightingale find
us, therefore, disposed to skip, and, to my
mind, they lose little who do so.

Psychology, however, must not be confused
with morality. Like all great writers of^
comedy, Fielding Each a strorig^^sensIEre - and
enlightened morality, superior",o the average

of "his day,~ anc ( ma ny passages which we may
fincT psychoTogically trite or dramatically out |
^ oTplace find a justificationjn his very plainly >
prdcTayJed~ moral purposyAN ot that th is
• makf^^ral atabl e all the pros ing s of Squire *
Allworthy qr_a.ll theargumentS-oLSquare and
Thwackujn: th e averag e m odern rea de r may
be~excused _if Ji£_find. them antiquated and
dusty. Yet (Fi elding’s insistence bn the su¬
preme importance~oTwhaFhe calk~ t< natural
igoodn ess of heart,” if it was valuable then as
jacbimterblasfalike to philosophical dogm atist)#
and to a system of pure self-interest, is still
valuable as being, in general, a true account;

19

TOM JONES

p:f the feeling from which springs right action.
'Tom Jones, it is true, j£pds to be tiresomely
high-flown on thesu biecti

“ What,” he cries on one occasion, “ is the
poor pride arising from a magnificent house,
a numerous equipage, a splendid table, and
from all the other advantages o r ap pearances
of^fortune, compared to the warm, solid con-
t ent, the swelling satisfaction, the thrilling
transports, and the exulting triumphs, which a
good mind enjoys, in the contemplation of a.
generous, virtuous, noble, benevolent action? ”

?'■ And again, when he is adjuring Nightingale
to make an honest woman of his Nancy, with
a certain turgid eloquence which is surprising
in a man of his education, he exclaims:

“ And what is this world, which you are
ashamed to face, % but the vile, the foolish, and
the profligate ? . I am well assured there

is not a man of real sense and goodness in the
world who would not honour and applaud
the action. But admit no other would, would
not your own heart, my friend, applaud it?
%And do not the warm, rapturous sensations,
which we feel from the consciousness of an
honest, noble, generous, benevolent action,

20 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

convey more delight to the mind than the
undeserved praise of millions ? ” X ’

For Tom Jones, being what he is, this
^eloquence, like his eloquence of love, is exces¬
sive and on the verge of the tiresome, but the
observations, stripped of their cumulative em¬
broidery, are in general accepted by modern
psychology. What Fielding is insisting on is
the importance of value, and, in its modern
psychological meaning,^the value of an action
fis determined by the degree.to which it satisfies
^important impulses without frustrating others_

| equally important. That which satisfactorily
'organises the impulses towards a full and free
life is valuable, and at moments when we are
conscious that this process is taking place wd
do, in fact, experience the “ warm, solid
content,” if not always the “ thrill of exulta-
tion.V of which Tom Jones speaks.

Fielding’s morality, then, we must not
^bntysay that it is virile, sensible and humane,

I but that it reveals a more than usually de-
/' veloped sense of value. His moral judgments
\ depend neither on dogmas nor conventions,
Vbut upon an innate consciousness, such as
Jbelongs only to great minds, of what in the ,
^infinite range of human action is really worthy /

TOM JONES

\

of approval? His Nightingale, considered as a
character, is rather colourless, but as a symbol
of a lower morality, that of polite society in
contrast to the rougher nobility of Tom Jones,
his appearance is justified. Tom himself is
disorganised enough, in all truth, but the light
of prudence will come to him, and it will not
be the cold prudence of the world but the
-warm prudence of an understanding mipch'
Fielding’s insistence upon the instinctive good¬
ness of his hero is, , therefore, no sham, or
sentimental devTc^P^We may demur to the
rhetoric of its'expression, since we have out¬
grown this type of monologue, but our accept¬
ance of it is radical to our appreciation of the
novel. I have confessed to a deeper personal
interest in the more developed analysis of
individual character which occurs in Amelia :
but with that confession goes a frank recog¬
nition that, whereas Amelia rests upon a
pietistic and sentimental view of morals,
fi othing is more remarkable in Tom Jones than
Fielding’s broad and serene outlook over the
range of human values. In that novel (both
his principles for the judgment of motive or
action and his application of them are un¬
impeachably sound and admirably persuasjvfp
With these, and with the help of his pure,

22 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

massive and vigorous style, he impresses him¬
self upon his theme and upon his audience,
as the incomparable showman, the very symbol
of Providence, who with masterful and just
but benign hand controls the play of his
puppets in all variety of situation, to our sur¬
prise and our amusement, often for our edifica¬
tion, but never to our disgust or resentment.

Here lies the supreme quality of Tom Jones —
a comprehensive quality, belonging to the
whole rather than the parts, which sums up
excellences of detail and carries off the absence
of certain other interests which are to be noted
in each of his remaining novels. On this
ground, it seems, one is forced to make repara¬
tion for any negations in one’s attitude to what,
as a whole, is Fielding’s masterpiece. In all
of his work, naturally, there are elements.
t which appear antiquated to us; the society
1 and the conditions described have a historical
rather than an immediate appeal, the diction
is formal in comparison to modern speech, the
humomuof certain situations has faded, and so
fortlfj'^yet, in each of his novels there is some¬
thing, ^besides their high technical accomplish¬
ment, which more than counterbalances this
[dead weight. In Joseph Andrews it is Parson
Adams, in Jonathan Wild the flame of irony,

23

TOM JONES

and in Amelia the penetrating analysis and
dramatisation of motive^N ajit in Tom Jones th is
counterw eight is something far more massive,
/and I should be inclined to call it the domin-
ance of t he author’s spirit at th e culmination
of his first maturity 40 Fielding was happy
again when he~wrote it,' not yet overburdened
in body or mind by his work as a magistrate,
and he appeared to have a firm grasp of life
in alt its essentials. No man, if he live, can
prolong such a moment, for l ife, like a restive
horse, has tricks to unseat the most secure.
Experience was to bring Fielding more doubts
ana more pities, but for the moment he could
take the epic or comic view of humanity,
laughing much, no longer angry and pitying
j only a little, as he looked down from that seat
[ in the clouds to which his genius had lifted
him. To the epic or comic poet a pinnacle
of this kind is necessary: like Homer, he must
know how the gods laugh over their banquet
on Olympus when they observe the antics of
puny mortals. Yet only the power of his own
mind, not the gods themselves, will so lift him
up; and he who tries to fly without the wings
comes down like Icarus. Fi elding had the
wings, and, when he wrote Tom Jones , he sat
i laughing with the~gods. T’hefe^ is "something

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

, superhuman, almost inhuman, in utterances of
ft comedy when supreme upon the heights, but
{they are comprehensive and compelling. And
a sun seems to glow upon the art of a great
comic writer, as it glowed upon Squire All¬
worthy in his garden, investing it with radio-.,
active properties which persist even .when its
piitward glamour has faded with yearf.

It is some ^emanation of this kind which
makes the reading of Tom Jones, no less than
of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a valuable and
invigorating experience .^And though Chaucer,
being a poet, had the sweeter voice, there is a
strong kinship between these works and their
( writers. Both, from the pinnacle of comedy
and with the wide-sweeping glance of comic
genius, looked down upon contemporary Eng¬
land, and from all that they saw and heard,
the scenes and faces, the shouts and cries, the
gossip and the laughter, they built the lasting
fabric of great art. They transformed the
commonplace and reduced order to confusion
without assailing truth; indeed, they reveal
truth, for it is the virtue of such art to clarify
the mistier impressions of lesser men. Any one
of us, in a moment of pride, may flatter himself
that he knows the British scenes and the
British characters—those rich materials for

i TOM JONES

contemplation; but what account could any
of us give, to ourselves or to another, so wide,
so lucid and so penetrating as our great comic
poets have already given? If for particular
knowledge we must look to science, it is art
and poetry which enshrine the general. Like
Chaucer and Shakespeare and, even, Dickens,
'fieldingy.especiallyJn Tom Jones,-is not .only a
great builder but a.,great jteacher, not in the
pedagogic, hortatory sense, but as the incor¬
porator of valuable knowledge and experience
in a lasting and magnificent iornyj
><We see, then, an added force in M. Digeon’s
simile that likened Tom Jones to a great ship.
There may be more grace in a schooner and
more excitement in a lively yacht, but we
cannot deny admiration to the clipper. And
Fielding’s clipper Tom Jones , one of the garliest
built, has remained, through all changes of
fashion and task, a model of its particular
kind; for its ample yet stately lines have a
fundamental relation to-those of our national
British temperament.^

II

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

One sits down to write about Dickens with
an acute sense of discouragement. From
Taine to Chesterton he has been exhaustively
criticised, discussed and appreciated: it would
be so much better to sit and just read him.
So that any reader who straightway shuts this
book and takes down Martin Chuzzlewit from
the shelf has my sympathy. Yet, if he feels
inclined to talk about it, when he has again
regretfully closed the book, he will sympathise
with me. To talk about what one loves, be it
an old love or a new, is but natural, and for
me Martin Chuzzlewit is an old love. I took
it up first, at eight years old—not more—to
while away a summer afternoon at Hampstead
in a green field, now red with serried brick,
upon the slopes of Frognal. It was too tender
an age, no doubt, and my sisters’ nurse cer¬
tainly thought so, for I remember her remark¬
ing severely to a neighbouring nurse that it

26

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

27

was “ not a nice book for a young gentleman
on a Sunday afternoon.” The kind of nice¬
ness that she meant was more obvious to me
than any want of it in Martin Chuzzlewit, for I
read the story as a strange enchantment with
only fitful glimmerings of its meaning. The
worldly and gruesome dealings of Jonas
Chuzzlewit and Tigg made no impression on
a childish mind, Mrs. Gamp awoke no laughter,
Pecksniff seemed a dreary character, the
excellence of Tom Pinch and the sweetness of
Ruth were equally ineffective. Indeed, I
regret to confess, as early evidence of a sensual
nature, that the one passage which I now
remember to have caused me exquisite delight
and which I read over and over again, was the
description of the sherry cobbler wherewith
MarkTapley comforted the despondent Martin.

“ He produced a very large tumbler, piled
up to the brim with little blocks of clear trans¬
parent ice, through which one or two thin
slices of lemon, and a golden liquid of delicious
appearance, appealed from the still depths
below, to the loving eye of the spectator. ...”

Thus was formed my childish image of an
ideal drink, lovingly cherished throughout
adolescence until, some twenty years later,

28 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

realisation—as always—shattered its magic
beauty for ever. Sherry, I now sadly main¬
tain, is better undiluted. Yet, on reading that
happy incident again, a ghost of the old
enchantment rises up to remove my dis¬
couragement with a reviving draught. For a
draught of Dickens is reviving and full of
potent flavour. How could it be otherwise
with a writer who l oved so widely, felt s o
k eenly, and talked so magnificently of the
ma ny things he loved ?

This magnificent gusto is one of Dickens’
greatest qualities, and one which, more than
any other, must cause discouragement to
spirits not so gifted. In the art of writing, as
in all other arts, much can be learned, much
acquired by observation and practice, but
super-vitality is a natural gift that no toil will
produce. One cannot compete with it, but
one can at least admire it, for its value is
inestimable. It is the supreme creative force
which runs in multitudinous channels through
the universe, and when an extra measure of
it runs in the veins of an artist it lifts him and
his art up on to a level to which only like spirits
can ascend. Seldom are critics and com¬
mentators endowed with this divine energy,
for, if they were, they too would be creators.

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

29

They, therefore, must contemplate these more
fortunate beings from below. They may still
criticise acutely and make just comparisons,
on the condition that they remember they are
looking upwards. A semblance of looking
downwards falsifies all their words. Looking
upwards does not imply blind worship, for
nothing human is perfect. There are imper¬
fections and idiosyncrasies in Dickens which
need not be denied. Martin Chuzzleivit, begun
without a complete view of its development
and issued in parts, as it was composed, is not
exempt from them; yet no work of Dickens’ is
more amply sustained from beginning to end
by that inexhaustible electric energy which
flowed into his pen. Compared with Dickens,
Fielding is staid, Balzac often laboured and
Tolstoy heavy. His was not a pumped-up
nervous energy, tense but intermittent: it
was an elemental fluid finding a natural and
happy outlet. He seems to breathe oxygen,
not common air; and perhaps it is the slug¬
gishness of common air to common breathers
which, in unlucky moments, makes Dickens’
exuberance almost intolerable. Thus, in
Martin Chuzzlewit, where there is little ex¬
uberance of pathos, one may find oneself
overpowered by the tender jocularity of the

30 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

love passages between Westlock and Ruth
Pinch; yet, even here, the fault is not wholly
with Dickens.

The creative energy in Martin Chuzzlewit is
truly stupendous. Not exhausted by carrying
along an exciting story, by the creation of such
characters as Pecksniff and his daughters,
Mark Tapley, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp,
Mrs. Lupin, Mrs. Todgers, Tom Pinch and
Ruth, Montague Tigg, Poll Sweedlepipe and
Bailey, and the addition of such minor person¬
ages as Colonel Diver, Jefferson Brick, Mrs.
Hominy, Elihu Scadder, Elijah Pogram, Nad-
gett, Dr. Jobling, Mould and Betsey Prig, it
runs over to animate the incidentals with its
wonderful vivacity. How it snatches up the
reader at the very opening of Chapter II—
the first real chapter—with the evocation of
an autumn day, when the declining sun “ like
a sudden flash of memory or spirit kindling up
the mind of an old man, . . . shed a glory
upon the scene, in which its departed youth
and freshness seemed to live again ” ! In such
a passage as this, which runs on for three pages,
what charms and surprises is not only the
youth and beauty of the picture but the lim¬
pidity of Dickens’ eloquence. Jt is no piece
of elaborate “ fine writing,” no mosaic of

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 31

tortured phraseology, but a description of the
utmost simplicity, naturally but beautifully
phrased, which does nothing but reproduce,
though upon a higher level, the ordinary
Englishman’s impression of a country village
on an autumn afternoon.

“ The fallen leaves, with which the ground
was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance,
and subduing all harsh sounds of distant feet
and wheels, created a repose in gentle unison
with the light scattering of seed hither and
thither by the distant husbandman, and with
the noiseless passage of the plough as it turned
up the rich brown earth, and wrought a grace¬
ful pattern in the stubbled fields.”

The sun goes down, the wind rises, and the
eloquence rises with it from its quiet beginning
to a jovial personification of the wind.

“ Out upon the angry wind ! how from
sighing, it began to bluster round the merry
forge, banging at the wicket, and grumbling
in the chimney, as if it bullied the jolly bellows
for doing anything to order. And what an
impotent swaggerer it was too, for all its noise;
for if it had any influence on that hoarse com¬
panion, it was but to make him roar his cheerful

32 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

song the louder, and by consequence to make
the fire burn the brighter, and the sparks to
dance more gaily yet: at length, they whizzed
so madly round and round, that it was too
much for such a surly wind to bear: so off
it flew with a howl: giving the old sign before
the ale-house door such a cuff as it went, that
the Blue Dragon was more rampant than usual
ever afterwards, and indeed, before Christmas,
reared clean out of its crazy frame.”

And so on till Mr. Pecksniff is found, lying
on his back at the bottom of the steps. What
an easy mastery, what a natural vigour, what
an absence of artificiality! Dickens is truly a
poet in these happy moments, when the force
within him crystallises in musical, rhythmical
and pure English his intense reactions to scenes
beautiful, invigorating and delightful. The
famous descriptions of the Blue Dragon with
Mrs. Lupin “ tight as a gooseberry,” of Tom
Pinch’s drive on a bright winter’s morning, or
Martin’s walk with Tom into Salisbury and
the dinner with John Westlock, of the ship
buffeted by the storm, of Tom Pinch’s coach-
drive with its “ Yoho! Yoho!”, of the
London Wharf and of the storm in which
Jonas and Tigg were upset are notin the least

MARTIN CHUZZLEW 1 T 33

“ beauties ” to be detached from an other¬
wise humdrum narrative; they are all of a
piece with Mrs. Gamp’s immortal conversation
and Dr. Jobling’s discourse upon Mr. Grimple’s
leg. They are all sparks from the fire in the
great writer’s soul. It did not need a rapt
contemplation of beauty to call them forth.
Dickens had only to love anything, and
immediately that love blew the bellows.

He loved, for instance, that smoky old
London where he had toiled and suffered as a
lad, so that when a spark of his love went out,
in consequence, to illuminate Todgers’s district
he made it even more inspiring than Ruth
Pinch’s pretty face.

“ Strange solitary pumps were found near
Todgers’s hiding themselves for the most part
in blind alleys, and keeping company with
fire-ladders. There were churches also by
dozens, with many a ghostly little churchyard,
all overgrown with such straggling vegetation
as springs up spontaneously from damp, and
graves, and rubbish. In some of these dingy
resting-places which bore much the same
analogy to green churchyards, as the pots of
earth for mignonette and wall-flower in the
windows overlooking them did to rustic gardens,

D

34

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

there were trees; tall trees; still putting forth
their leaves in each succeeding year, with
such a languishing remembrance of their kind
(so one might fancy, looking on their sickly
boughs) as birds in cages have of theirs. Here,
paralysed old watchmen guarded the bodies
of the dead at night, year after year, until at
last they joined that solemn brotherhood. . . .
In like manner, there were gloomy courtyards
in these parts, into which few but belated
wayfarers ever strayed, and where vast bags
and packs of goods, upward or downward
bound, were for ever dangling between heaven
and earth from lofty cranes. There were more
trucks near Todgers’s than you would suppose
a whole city could ever need; not active
trucks, but a vagabond race, for ever lounging
in the narrow lanes before their masters’ doors
and stopping up the pass. ... In the throats
and maws of dark no-thoroughfares near
Todgers’s, individual wine-merchants and
wholesale dealers in grocery-ware had perfect
little towns of their own; and, deep among
the foundations of these buildings, the ground
was undermined and burrowed out into
stables, where cart-horses, troubled by rats,
might be heard on a quiet Sunday rattling
their halters, as disturbed spirits in tales

MARTIN CHUZZLEWH

35

of haunted houses are said to clank their
chains.”

It is an impressive thought that these
passages of animated description, absolute as
their artistic value is, have but a minor import¬
ance in Dickens’ whole achievement. Sown
freely up and down all his works, from the
Pickwick Papers onwards, so far from “ making ”
those works, they are but the framework and
the ornaments to which an extraordinarily
rich creative impulse has given the same life
and variety as to the central features. Yet it
does not do to minimise or ignore their felicity.
Of course it is easier to describe a scene than
to create and completely realise a character,
but Dickens’ d escriptions are not mere des crip¬
ti ons, th ey are the mselves inanimate characters.
It is plain that he regarded them with the
same affection and excitement as his men and
women: the neighbourhood of Todgers’s was
no less dear to him than Nadgett or the fruity
porter of the Anglo-Bengalee Company, and
the glow of a frosty morning in lusty limbs no
less stimulating than Ruth Pinch’s blushes.
When Dickens, as nearly always, completely
commanded his material, he made every par¬
ticle of it live, human and natural alike, and

36 SOME GREAT: ENGLISH NOVELS

every living particle radio-active to its neigh¬
bours. And it is this animating power, never
more intense than in Martin Chuzzlewit, which
seems in his novels to imbue, not only human
beings, but sun and wind, walls and windows,
coaches and carts, bottles, dishes, glasses and
jugs, with a spark of Dickens’ genius: a broom,
a counterpane, a warming-pan take on a wholly
different air, when Dickens introduces them,
from what they wear in any other novels. The
trucks near Todgers’s, “ not active trucks, but
a vagabond race, for ever lounging in the
narrow lanes,” cannot be simply material:
they are bewitched into movement and given
a physiognomy. Even where Dickens had not
complete mastery of his matter, this demoniac
energy pulled him through, as in the American
scenes of Martin Chuzzlewit. In these episodes
Dickens was relying, not upon a deep know¬
ledge or a long and sympathetic acquaintance,
but upon the impressions of a voyage. They
were introduced in the hope of attracting the
public, which had given a disappointing recep¬
tion to the earlier parts, and they were de¬
liberately intended to illustrate the ludicrous
side of American life. They could be taken
bodily out of Martin Chuzz^wit without any
artistic loss, and yet what an extraordinary

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 37

vigour they have! The conversations of
Colonel Diver and Major Hannibal Chollop,
the mid-day meal at Pawkins’s and Elijah
Pogram’s levee at the moment when Miss
Toppit and Miss Codger are introduced by
Mrs. Hominy are things which do not easily
fade from the memory, and tend to efface that
sense of disconnectedness which we justly feel
when Martin himself suddenly abandons the
role of a selfish young man to be reformed by
suffering, and becomes the ironical interro¬
gator of exaggeratedly conceited Americans.
Yes, it was right to be enchanted by the
sherry cobbler, as a boy: the true Dickens
was as surely in that exotic glass as in the
bumpers at the Blue Dragon which Mark
and Martin exultantly shared on their
return.

A creative force such as that with which
Dickens was endowed is, in itself, nothing but
free energy: it has no will, no consciousness,
no direction, but all these are given to it by
the great artist. What was the direction which
Dickens gave to his super-abundant energy?
It was to the expression in imaginative form of
three guiding emotions which one may call,
shortly, l ove, humour and moral indignation .
Any of his great novels might be taken to

38 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

illustrate this view and in each one the relative
proportions of these three elements would be
found different. Martin Chuzzlewit, however,
is admirably representative of the mixture,
especially as it is not overcharged with that
form of love which is pity. Certainly, the pity
of a truly great mind contemplating the world
is one of the human emotions most nearly
approaching the divine, but pity may de¬
generate, as it sometimes did in Dickens’
novels, into pathos; and the defect of patho s
is that it isolates a human si tuation till it los es

all proporti on_to its surrounding s. The

pathetic could not present itself to the eye of
God. There are places in Martin Chuzzlewit
where Dickens’ love takes this imperfect form.
His portrait of Tom Pinch, for instance, has
many excellences as the presentation of a
simple, humble and upright character, content
with his lot, easily deceived and wanting only
in that energy which moulds circumstance;
but Dickens’ apostrophes on his behalf have
an excess of sentimentality.

“ Tom, Tom! The man in all this world
most confident in his sagacity and shrewdness
. . . shall never find, oh, never find, be sure
of that, the time come home to him, when all

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

39

his wisdom is an idiot’s folly, weighed against
a simple heart! ”

Dickens makes a disproportionate claim on
our admiration for Tom Pinch, and we recog¬
nise the disproportion when we compare this
character with Sterne’s Uncle Toby—a wholly
superior creation. Again, having made up¬
roarious fun of Mercy Pecksniff’s artificial
frivolity, Dickens would carry us over to an
excess of tenderness on her behalf when she
becomes the humble, tearful and brow-beaten
wife of Jonas Chuzzlewit.

“Not with a blow? Yes. Stern truth
against the base-souled villain: with a blow.

“No angry cries; no loud reproaches.
Even her weeping and her sobs were stifled by
her clinging round him. She only said,
repeating it in agony of heart, How could he,
could he, could he! And lost utterance in
tears.

“ Oh woman, God beloved in old Jerusalem!
The best among us need deal lightly with thy
faults, if only for the punishment thy nature
will endure, in bearing heavy evidence against
us on the Day of Judgment! ”

Truly there is a discord in this sudden trans-

40 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

formation of the sprightly Merry who mocked
her “ griffin ” into the type of all suffering
womanhood.

Dickens’ love took higher forms than these;
and “ love ” is, perhaps, an equivocal expres¬
sion for his emotion. It was not that love
which is a complete self-surrender, nor that
which embraces everything in a contemplative
serenity, still less a parching thirst for some
supra-mundane ideal of beauty: it was rather
an intense rapture in all those aspects of the
world as it is which pleasantly roused his acute
sensibility, whether the aspect were a glass of
beer, a rattling coach, or an oddity of character.
He was an enthusiast for quality wherever he
perceived it, and, just as his enthusiasm for
natural scenes and objects found its outlet in
those magnificent passages of description to
which I have already referred, so his enthusiasm
for human characters issued in creations like
Pecksniff, Sairey Gamp, Mrs. Lupin, Tigg,
and the rest. Nor was it only in character as
such that he felt this rapture, but in the inter¬
action of characters. Human natures in con¬
tact are explosive, and Dickens loved an
explosion, whether of laughter or hate, for
itself.

He did not place his explosive elements

MARTIN CHUZZLEWH

4i

together and sit delicately apart exclaiming
“ How interesting! ” and wondering what
would happen. Not at all. He rather
strengthened the charges and then fired the
train himself with infinite glee. What we call
Dickens’ tendency to melodrama is simply this
love of an explosion. He was determined that
there should be no mistake about it, no half¬
hearted pop behind the scenes, but that every¬
body should share the fun or the thrill. Thus,
in Martin Chuzzlewit, his rapture not only gives
us the magnificent scenes of comedy—Peck¬
sniff’s welcome of Martin Chuzzlewit, the
dinner at Todgers’s, Mrs. Gamp’s tea-making
and the quarrel of Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig
—but it enhances the senility of Anthony
Chuzzlewit and old Chuffey, the balefulness
of Jonas, the fatality of Nadgett, the cynical
villainy of Tigg and the patient waiting for
vengeance of old Martin. Whenever there is
any desperate dealing afoot, one feels Dickens
on tip-toe. He is almost too eager. From the
moment when Jonas, after his interception on
the ship, comes to a decision, there is no mis¬
take about the nature of that decision. His
eager questioning of Dr. Jobling as to the
position of the jugular vein, his ghastly merri¬
ment, his behaviour in the coach with Tigg,

42 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

and his demeanour on disturbing the pleasam
tea-party give him desperately away. Even
that is not enough. Tom Pinch , on that last
occasion, had intended to mention the sleuth
Nadgett’s name, but Jonas’ violence had pre¬
vented him. Dickens, agog with excitement,
rubs in this disappearance of the villain’s last
chance.

“ If the name could have passed his lips;
if Jonas, in the insolence of his vile nature, had
never roused him to do that old act of man¬
liness, for which (and not for his last offence)
he hated him with such malignity; if Jonas
could have learned, as he then could and would
have learned, through Tom’s means, what
unsuspected spy there was upon him; he
would have been saved from the commission
of a Guilty Deed, then drawing on towards its
black accomplishment.”

How capital are those capital letters, and
with what a rapture of gruesomeness—not
brutality—is that Guilty Deed described and
its consequences visited upon the loathsome
doer! Dickens loved his tragic as dearly as
his comic episodes, and the creative energy *
that flowed into Sairey Gamp was the same
that animated Jonas Chuzzlewit and Quilp.

MAMIN CHTJZZLEWH

Nevertheless, though Dickens’ enthusiastic
r enjoyment of every character and situation is
captivating in its torrential energy , he reaches
his supreme heights when humour is added to
love. Forster, in his Life of Dickens , justly
complains of those critics who picked holes in
his work without any appreciation of his
humour, as if Dickens, after Shakespeare, were
not our greatest comic poet. Tragedy was (
not in his line, if only because in tragedy
the element of proportion is vital. Dickens’!
very exuberance forbade proportion, while
it gave a vigour, a broadness and a variety
to his comedy which has made it, in spite
of all fastidious objections, the delight ofj
every normal reader. It hardly needs saying
that Shakespeare’s broad comedy is superior to
that of Dickens, for Shakespeare had an un¬
paralleled profundity. What he added to an
intense creative force was a spiritual under¬
standing of human life and human nature to
which few men have ever attained. The hand
which fashioned Hamlet and Cleopatra also
fashioned Falstaff and Malvolio: of that we
need no proof. Even at his merriest, Shake¬
speare went below the surface. Falstaff, Mal¬
volio, even Sir Toby Belch are more than comic
types; they are men like ourselves who suffer

44

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

and enjoy, with an ache lurking behind their
laughter and a painful sense, even at the height
of their antics, of the outrage which they are
putting upon the dignity of their own natures.
It is enough to compare the overthrow of
Falstaff with that of Mr. Pecksniff. We pity
Falstaff but we only smile at prostrate Peck¬
sniff. Yet, if Dickens’ comedy, compared
with Shakespeare’s, is superficial, that does
not convict it of falsity. There is a great deal
of truth upon the surface, whether of men or
of things; and Dickens seized that truth with
a rapturous acuteness which no other English
novelist, unless it be Fielding, has ever dis¬
played.

Pecksniff and his daughters, Sairey Gamp,
Mrs. Todgers, Dr. Jobling, Tigg and Chevy
Slyme are not untrue; they are only incom¬
plete from the point of view of perfect know¬
ledge. There is no reason why comic narra¬
tive should be informed by an all-embracing
knowledge, since the greater part of observable
life takes place on the surface. It is a common
regret of men and women that they are judged
by their surfaces; but how else should they
be judged when their depths break through so
seldom ? All we can object to in Pecksniff and
Sairey Gamp is that their third dimension is

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 45

wanting, and we cannot even infer it except,
possibly, in Pecksniff’s case, when he is loath¬
somely wooing Mary Graham or falling, like
a greedy gull, into the trap laid for him by
Tigg. One is bound, on cool reflection, to
admit this deficiency, but in the heat of reading
how little it is apparent! Dickens makes up
for it magnificently by his masterly grip upon
the two dimensions, and by the variety, the
vivacity and the conviction with which he dis¬
plays them. Martin Chuzzlewit is a great novel,
and it is the comic scenes and characters that
make it so. From the moment when Pecksniff
is seen recovering, with pickled brown paper
and brandy, in the back parlour we are under
the spell of Dickens’ irresistible power of comic
delineation and inexhaustible invention of
comic dialogue. And if his greatest scenes are
episodic, like the dinner at Todgers’s and Mrs.
Gamp’s visit to the Moulds, there is no fault
in that. One must stand still to laug h; and
having laughed prodigiously with Dickens the
mind is so lightened that, like an airy body, it
is carried rapidly onward by the rush of his
subsequent narration.

Upon Mrs. Gamp and Pecksniff their creator
visits a certain amount of moral indignation.
His was not the indignation of a philosopher or

46 SOME GREAT: ENGLISH NOVELS

a puritan, but the blaze of a very generous
heart which had known much misery, against
the people and abuses which cause most of the
misery suffered by common humanity, par¬
ticularly by the humanity of large towns.
Dickens’ indignation varies considerably in
emphasis throughout his work, and it is
observable that it is least effective where it is
least disguised. When he exhibits the naked
flames, instead of using their heat to fire the
crucible of his art, the appearance is not par¬
ticularly impressive. Thus, in Martin Chuzzle-
wit, the indignation is really fiercest just where
the art is coldest, namely, in some of the
incidental American scenes, where he uncon¬
trollably bursts out into immoderate diatribes
which justly earned American resentment.
His bare opinion was not deeply enough
founded to be truly valuable, when dog¬
matically expressed. The portraits of Colonel
Diver, Scadder and Hannibal Chollop would
have been more than sufficient, and there
the artist was allowing his emotion to fulfil
its proper function of fusing into a par¬
ticular form the elements of his observation.
Again, the moral theme in general of this^
n<^vel is the evil of selfishness, and yet the
lesson of Martin Chuzzlewit is the thing to which

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

47

its readers pay a very perfunctory attention.
The reform of thoughtless and self-centred
young Martin, the wooden attitude of Mark
Tapley with his recurrent tag about “ coming
out strong,” and the rhetorical speeches of old
Martin concerning the curse of riches do not
either pierce our hearts or satisfy our judg¬
ments : we take them as so much machinery,
enjoying the individuals in action, but bidding
them go hang as moral instances. As for
Jonas Chuzzlewit, we thrill to him as a mon¬
strous villain, but it really matters very little
whether or no old Anthony’s system of edu¬
cation would normally produce such a villain.
After all, Anthony is a monstrosity.

The truth is that Dickens’ moral indigna¬
tion, for all its natural heat, only approaches
sublimity of expression when it is almost
indistinguishable from love. He loved young
Martin a little, Mark Tapley a little more, and
Jonas Chuzzlewit a great deal; but these
affections were nothing beside his emotions
towards Sairey Gamp and Pecksniff. Sairey
Gamp, as the type of incompetent, drunken
sick nurse, might have been treated like
Scadder; with a few masterly touches of
description and dialogue she would have been
as vivid a figure, and no more. That would

48 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

have been sufficient for Dickens’ indignation.
But he fell in love with her, of course he did—
with her umbrella, her rusty gown, her master¬
ful treatment of unruly patients, her well-
mapped alcoholic regimen and, above all, the
allusive, meandering, Gampian eloquence that
has become immortal. How could he have
imagined her making herself comfortable in
the sick Lewsome’s bedroom, unless he had
loved her so much that he became merged in
her? Is it not Dickens himself, in the person
of Mrs. Gamp, who gives the order for supper ?

“ ‘ I think, young woman,’ said Mrs. Gamp
to the assistant chambermaid, in a tone expres¬
sive of weakness, ‘ that I could pick a little bit
of pickled salmon, with a nice little sprig of
fennel, and a sprinkling of white pepper. I
takes new bread, my dear, with just a little
pat of fresh butter, and a mossel of cheese.
In case there should be such a thing as a cow-
cumber in the ’ouse, will you be so kind as
bring it, for I’m rather partial to ’em, and they
does a world of good in a sick room. If they
draws the Brighton Old Tipper here, I takes
that ale at night, my love; it bein’ considered
wakeful by the doctors. And whatever you
do, young woman, don’t bring more than a

MARTIN CHUZZLEW1T

49

shilling’s-worth of gin and water warm when I
rings the bell a second time.’ ”

The “ Brighton Old Tipper ” alone gives
the man away. In this early speech, however,
Dickens had not entirely warmed to Mrs.
Gamp’s eloquence; but his warmth grew
apace, and by the time that Sairey was pre¬
siding at poor Mercy’s tea-table, “ resting her
saucer on the palm of her outspread hand,” he
had completely incorporated her. In that
scene and at every subsequent appearance her
speeches are classic, and go on from strength
to strength. It might have been thought that
her quarrel with Betsey Prig would have been
her climax, and that no invention about the
Harris family could have eclipsed the reminis¬
cence of Mrs. Harris’ First,

“ which Mr. Harris who was dreadful timid
went and stopped his ears in an empty dog-
kennel, and never took his hands away or
came out once till he was showed the baby,
wen bein’ took with fits, the doctor collared
him and laid him on his back upon the airy
stones, and she was told to ease her mind, his
owls was organs.”

But it was not so. Even in the midst of old

E

So SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Martin’s tremendous dealing out of justice,
when Pecksniff himself loses artistic solidity,
Sairey Gamp rises to a still more gigantic
stature of inconsequence with her last oration
about her business,

“ ‘ which, Mr. Chuzzlewit,’ she said, ‘ is
well beknown to Mrs. Harris as has one sweet
infant (though she do not wish it known) in
her own family by the mother’s side, kep in
spirits in a bottle; and that sweet babe she
see at Greenwich Fair, a-traveiling in company
with the pink-eyed lady, Prooshan dwarf, and
livin’ skelinton, which judge her feelins when
the barrel organ played, and she was showed
her own dear sister’s child, the same not bein’
expected from the outside picter, where it was
painted quite contrairy in a livin’ state, a
many sizes larger, and performing beautiful
upon the Arp, which never did that dear child
know or do: since breathe it never did to
speak on, in this wale! ’ ”

And when, after the curt words of old
Martin, she “ fell into one of the walking
swoons ” and departed on the arm of Poll
Sweedlepipe, we feel that the brightest light in
the book has gone out. For we, too, love

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 51

Mrs. Gamp, and all the moral indignation left
is a very subtle refinement of that emotion.

Similar considerations apply to Pecksniff,
whose very name is a masterpiece. We may
well loathe him and blush for him as a portrait
of that vice of hypocrisy with which, not
altogether unjustly, foreign observers tax us.
But what indignation can stand out against
the picture of Mr. Pecksniff benignantly sway¬
ing against the banisters and asking to be
favoured with Mrs. Todgers’s idea of a wooden
leg ? P ecksniff, like Bottom, is t ranslated:
Dickens’ love, overpowering primary indig¬
nation, snatches him up and places him in a
legendary world, which has no less reality than
the world of fact, though it is a different reality.
His hypocrisy takes on a heroic stature, in the
light of Dickens’ comedy: it becomes an
idealised master pattern to which mere sub¬
lunary Pecksniffism can only approximate.
To compare him with individuals and call him
a caricature is to miss the truth of Pecksniff
altogether. He is a comic sublimation, like
the Socrates of Aristophanes’ Clouds. Mere
caricatures do not live, since their momentary v
life is bound up with that of their transitory
subjects; but Pecksniff lives for ever, in the full
bloom of his oily cheerfulness, in the company

52 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

of Cherry and Merry, the pride of Tom Pinch
and of a Wiltshire village. We almost regret
his exposure and we forget that figure of
a “ drunken, squalid, begging-letter-writing
man ” who, in the epilogue, is said to live
on Tom Pinch’s magnanimity. Against so
unctuous a spirit revengefulness is unavailing:
Dickens, who called him up and adored him,
was powerless to destroy him. The bare
mention of Martin Chuzzlewit conjures him
before us at once in all the perfection of cunning
imposture, half persuaded of virtue by the
vehemence of his own professions.

“ ‘ When I have wound myself up, if I may
employ such a term,’ said Mr. Pecksniff with
exquisite tenderness, ‘ and know that I am
Going, I feel that in the lesson afforded by
the works within me, I am a Benefactor to my
Kind.’ ”

That is the Pecksniff who defies death—a
figure whom only Dickens, the creator of so
many immortals, could have fashioned. And
his type exists to-day, though in altered cir¬
cumstances : we may find him on the staff of
nearly every newspaper.

Ill

PENDENNIS

Pendennis is Thackeray’s Tom Jones, his
Illusions Perdues, his Education Sentimentale : it
belongs to the great branch of biographical
novels, of which Marcel Proust’s A la recherche
des temps perdus is one of the latest and most
important descendants. The cadets of this
family, especially in English literature, are as
numerous as the waves of the sea, but they
have neither the stature nor the longevity of
the great branch. How many novels have we
not read in the last thirty years that carried a
hero through school and university, through
his first love and his first adventures in London
up to the time when he is forty, married and
no longer heroic? And how many of these
still keep the vitality of Pendennis ? Though all
the characters, conditions, customs and public
opinions of which that novel was true have
passed away, it stubbornly lives on as a work
to be reckoned with, apart from any enjoy-

53

54 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

ment which may, or may not, be derived
from reading it. This persistence of Pen-
dennis is something of a mystery. Many com¬
pleter works of art have already wilted, and
hundreds more admirable heroes than Arthur
Pendennis are now forgotten. Moreover, its
vitality is not Thackeray’s vitality in the sense
that the vitality of Martin Chuzzlewit is abun¬
dantly Dickens’ — an irresistible personal
emanation as heady as strong wine: in
Pendennis , at all events, Thackeray the man is
rather a pale and peevish ghost, whose ten¬
dency to irritating soliloquy will cure most
readers of any wish to revive him. Yet your
Clay hangers and Tono-Bungays and Sinister Streets,
though more modern, more pointed and pos¬
sibly more amusing, turn a little sickly, like
the gods in Walhall without Freia’s apples,
when brought alongside of this long, rambling
and episodic tale.

Professor Saintsbury, one of the warmest
living admirers of Thackeray, asserts that “ one
finds a curious unanimity among qualified and
well-affected judges that Pendennis is, perhaps,
tjie most delightful of Th^^rayXSweli^and^
he proceeds7~in his Introduction to the Oxford
edition, to expatiate on the various delights.
It is very well, but I believe Pendennis to have

PENDENNIS

55

securer buttresses than these unanimities and
delights. The spirit of delight is a wayward
and inattentive creature, who does not always
come when you ring the bell: she waits
sedulously upon one generation and entirely
refuses to attend the next. She offers different
goods to different customers sitting at the
same moment at the same table; for what is
she, after all, but a phantom of the individual
temperament? But Pendennis, surely, is upheld
by admirat ion, eve nowhere sheer "delight - is
re straine d; and the qualities commanding
this more sober emotion explain, perhaps,
more cogent lyThe massiv e' durabilltv ~oF th e^
structure^.

No quality .in. Pendennis is more remarkable
than Tha cke ray’s, fidelity.-to experience- Vir¬
ginia Woolf, I think, refers fleetingly some-
~where in The Common Reader tcTTns “ patient
realism.” The accuracy of perception which
is that witty lady’s gift is reflected in this
apparently random phrase; and the emphasis
is to be laid, not upon the realism, but upon
the patience. The almost universal fault jof
m °dem bio graphical nov els is impatience, an
. infection from which n o work of art ever
recovers. Rapidity of execution is not neces¬
sarily a sign of impatience: the fatal impru-

56 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

dence is premature birth-giving, that snatching
of representations from the womb of thought
before they are ripe. All young artists are
subj ect to this impulse : it. is irresistihlp~~~Riit
they cannot override the laws of nature; and,
if they will choose for their seven-months
children types of art that only completest
gestation can properly shape, they must pay
the penalty. An impatiently written bio¬
graphical novel always betrays itself by an
element of caricature . The poor thing is not
solid, so it must Be tricked out to appear bright,
quaint, original, what you will. It earns its
applause and trips off to an early grave. We
need not repine. No physical suffering is
involved, and the authors of these creatures
are often most comfortably rewarded; but the
reward, like the creature, is perishable. The
patient artist, who conceives from a ripe mind,
does not bring to birth these weaklings, nor
conceal weaknesses by accentuating deformities.
He knows that, in the long run, nothing is so
dull, so commonplace, so unoriginal as the
unusual and the piquant. T o lew writers is it
given, as it was given to Dickens, to be a
creator of gigantic, supra-mundane absurdities:
there, is a force within such genius which dis¬
penses with patience. But for the others, even

PENDENNIS

57

for the greatest, patience is the golden virtue.
Novelists have never practised this virtue in
vain, for by it the y have discovered that the
great secrets and myst eries, the compelling
'tragedies and the abiding comedies, of human
life lie "Beneath the outwardly "uniform and
commonplace^ in the average experience ancll
in the passions and reactions which all menjl
share. Youth cannot realise this truth, and
middle age too o ften chooses to forget it.
Whole generatioris”seem sometimes to ignore
or to be afraid of it: possibly our own is one
of them. If so, we condemn ourselves to
inferiority in comparison with Thackeray’s
age. For patience in art shows courage and
great In ward Silling 1 lliTand Thackeray ’s age
^Kad these. Thackeray, perhaps^ had more
courage than strength , but ev en his strength
ITnortu bcdesplse d by us. Few imaginative
writers of our day have the strength to be so
faithful and so resolutely to resist the tempta¬
tion, for which there is no better word than
“ faking ” experience.

Pen dermis is a very long novel containing a
great variety of lively scenes and characters,
full of action, as abundant in humour a s in
sentiment , reflecting an exceedingl y wide and

58 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS
assiduous observation, and exploiting many

^ontains~~ no caricature! Indeed, Thackeray
»vas wanting in that cocksureness which
makes the good caricaturist; yet many a
novelist as sceptical as he would not have
avoided that almost involuntary surrender to
occasional weakness or weariness which results
in a comic or satirical foreshortening of ex¬
perience. Thackeray, as athletes say, had an
exceptional “ wind,” which carried him
through to the finish without any tricks or
makeshifts. It has been said that Captain
Costigan is a caricature, but this judgment, I
believe, rests upon mne or two aspects of him
that a re, not materials Possibly—ThoughTrF
the absence of direct historical evidence it
would be unwise to say certainly—so low a
character could never have been an officer in
an Irish regiment, even in time of war. Yet
it is to be remarked that the evi dence o f
Costigan’s service m~the “ foightmgHuncI^
therd a nd i nird " is noH more than'Tus own
unreliable conversation, and that his creator
makes no effort to substantiate it; so we may
dismiss it, if we please, with the visionary
glories of the Captain’s noble birth and
ancestral estater~~PuriST 5 , again, itiavnfeason^

PENDENNIS

59

ably take objection to the comic spelling in
which his words are rendered, as being in the
bad old tradition of farce. But, in truth, it is
almost impossible to render in written words
the unmistakable reality of a strong Irish
brogue, and the fact that Thackeray followed,
in this respect, a convention docs not convict

him of caricature*_These externals apart,

surely Costigan rings true enough as one of
those dissipated derelicts who are to be found
on the outskirts of the stage, a drunkard, a
sponger and a boaster, with impossible manners
and a few domestic virtues. Thackeray does
not strain his part in the story, which is a
comparatively small one: he uses him where
necessary and then dismisses him without
ceremony. Even on his first appearance, when
for a moment he t^Tes the centre of the stage
as Arthur’s chosen ihther-i«-law^_.Thackexa.)t
never exceed^aTdstnrTesframTln his comedy.
If you take the interview between Costigan and
Major Pendennis, when the latter undeceives
the Irishman with regard to Arthur’s prospects
—an episode where both characters, gradually
roused to anger, are thrown into high relief—
you will not find one illegitimate phrase or
forced remark. The situation is what makes
the comedy, not the idiosyncrasies of the

60 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

characters. It is a true test, out of which
Thackeray invariably comes with his artistic
honour untouched. He was too sure of his
effects to spoil them by over-emphasis.

It is not, however, by the character of
Costigan that Thackeray’s patient fidelity
stands or falls; for it is strikingly exemplified
in Pendennis, not only by the spacious rhythms
of the narrative, but in such characters as
s fielen and Arthur Pendennis, th e Major,
Laura and Bla nche, Harry Foker, Bom, the.
'Tothermgay and even Sir Francis Claver ing.
If Thackeray did not stand in English literature
so eminently as he does, and if Pendennis were
not so familiar, insistence upon this point
might be misunderstood as presenting this
great, polished and humorous writer in the
guise of a mere painstaking plodder. But let
us give praise that the brilliance, eloquence
and movement of Thackeray’s work are so
generally acknowledged that no misconception
can arise from pointing out how, with these
gifts at his command, he controlled and
enhanced them by the virtue of patience. He
_w as not afraid of being dull—a sure sign in an
author that he is master of~Kis mind .and -of
his material. Consider Arthur Pendennis, for
example. Nobody can claim that he is either

PENDENNIS

61

an admirable or a lovable person: he is
irritating and tiresome very often, without any
marked compensating virtue such as reconciles
us to generous Tom Jones. He is not even—
whatever Thackeray may have intended—a
good type of the average sensual Englishman,
who, apart from certain of Harry Foker’s
extravagances, is much more like that amiable
gentleman, fjen is a bit too clever, and a bit
too introspective, too like his creator, jn fine.-
Yyt with all these disadvantages Arthur Pen¬
dennis succeeds by the sheer strength, truth"
^!id" amplitude'oThis delineation. Above the
innumerable dead protagonists of biographical
novels he stands beside Tom Jones in the same
order of immortality. Martin Chuzzlewit was
another such vain and selfish young fellow, but
how ridiculous and mechanical he appears,
with his sudden conversion by Tapley and the
swamps, beside Arthur Pendennis! The com¬
parison, though it would be foolish to press it,
is a just one in essentials: both were spoilt
boys redeemed, or at least instructed, by ex¬
perience. And what Thackeray makes clear
in Arthur is that a convincing effect of this
kind can only be obtained by the patient
working out of unhurried detail and the delicate
^markin g of gradual change. It inrue that"

62 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

after the spirited opening with the Fotheringay
affair and the masterly rapidity with which
Arthur’s Oxford career is surveyed wc some¬
times groan under his dialogues with Warring¬
ton in the Temp1e 1 we hum and haw over so
much Fanny and, to wards the end, heartil y
curse Sadduceeism ancT Thackeray’s concern
about it; yet we have to confess that Arthur’s
flesh never changes into wood, that it is like
our own flesh, and that he passes out of the
last chapter into the interesting limbo of
“ ever afterwards,” as human, as wayward and
as incalculable as any of ourselves, still but
half-taught, half-resigned, irrationally hopeful
and unreasonably despondent.

“ His children or their mother have never
heard a harsh word from him; and when his
fits of moodiness and solitude are over, welcome
him back with never-failing regard and con¬
fidence.”

It has taken forty years and nearly a
thousand pages to give an individual point to
that remark,; and it will hardly ever take less,
whether in real life or fiction.

That Major Pendennis is a remarkable
creation needs no saying: we enjoy him and'
believe in him from the first moment when we

PENDENNIS

63

find him opening his letters at breakfast in his
club, and our belief is only a trifle shaken when,
in the interests of the not very telling intrigue
surrounding Altamont-Amory, he is shown
pleadingun his knees to Pen against th e latter’s
rejection of a dishonourable bargain—He is
one of those characters who continue to exist
outside the book in which they were born.
Though comic he is never ridiculous, and
though pitiable in his decline he is never con¬
temptible: indeed his manly defeat of the
cowardly Morgan—one of the most excellent
chapters in the whole book—admirably em¬
phasises th e solidity of the manjunder all the
painfuTrefinem e nts of his toilet and the pre-
judices of his caste. Unlike his nephew, he
comes on to the stage a formed character,
absolutely unchangeable, and in this respect he
superficially resembles many a character of
(Dickens. But in reality there is nothing
Dickensian about him. He is not the mag¬
nification of a fantasy, not the embodiment of
an idiosyncrasy enlarged by comic genius to
superhuman proportions, but the embodiment,
rather, of a very rigid attitude of mind, which
Thackeray more than once calls worldliness.
Professor Saintsbury says of the Major that
“ the club element has churned and foamed

64 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

itself into an elderly but wonderfully attractive
Venus of the other sex ”; but I confess to
finding the Major’s chief attraction elsewhere
than in his carefully preserved personal appear¬
ance and popularity. All the details of his
toilet, his bachelor habits, his social strategy,
his foibles and his snobbishness are exceedingly
lively and amusing, but what gives him his
stature is the extraordinary exactitude of his
presentatio n as the expressio n of a fixed attitude^
—-the attitude of worldly sell-interest. Here
again the triumph is of Thackeray’s patience
and artistic resourcefulness. The Major neve r
intrudes, vet things are so contrived th at he Is
~aTwayT thprp tn give his r eflection upon every
turn of And he never fails us,

whether he is manoeuvring the love-sick Pen
out of his entanglement, adroitly managing
Mrs. Pendennis while sparing her feelings,
paying court to the Begum or pressing his
worldly wisdom upon his nephew. His worldly
wisdom is dismal enough—though more dismal
to read than to practise—but it is so admirably
phrased by Thackeray that it never becomes
stale or mechanical, just as the Major himself,
whom the least hasty push on Thackeray’s
part would have made a figure of fun, never
loses his dignity. No chapter more admirably

PENDENNIS

65

shows how Thackeray kept his measure with
this character than that where the Major,
espying Arthur from Bays’s club window,
summons him and takes his arm to call upon
Lady Clavering, getting “ bows from a duke
at a crossing, a bishop (on a cob), and a
Cabinet Minister with an umbrella,” and
expounding, as he progresses, the poor swell’s
vade-mecum to a comfortable existence. It
would have been so easy to overdo the satire
and to shatter the Major with contempt; but
not so Thackeray, who waits and smiles and
registers. The Major’s venerating embrace
of the great duke’s gloved finger, his uncon¬
scious imitation of the duke’s curt sentences,
his expansive assertion that a magnate with
ten thousand acres of the best land in Cheshire
may do as he likes, and his patronising pride
in Arthur’s literary success, with a side glance
at “ poor Byron who ruined himself, and con¬
tracted the worst habits by living with poets
and newspaper writers,” are all so delicately
touched in that the old man’s shallowness and
vanity are exposed with all their bloom upon
them. His last speech in that chapter is
typical of Thackeray’s art.

“ ‘ Lady Clavering is going out for her

F

66 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

drive,’ the major said. ‘ We shall only have to
leave our pasteboards, Arthur.’ He used the
word ‘ pasteboards,’ having heard it from some
of the ingenuous youth of the nobility about
town, and as a modern phrase suited to Pen’s
tender years.”

Only Thackeray would have observed so
small a matter and have used it as an almost
unnoticeable stroke precisely where it was
most telling. A similar skill, a skill of in¬
finitely patient accumulation us ed with abso-
lute relevance, can be traced in tKe pres enta-,
ti on of the silly curate Smirke, Bo ws the
embittered musician, Samuel Huxter the vulgar
but good-hearted young medical student, and,
above all, in Harry Foker. Harry Foker
might have been just a jolly joke, a kind of
superior Bob Allen, with his horsiness, his
“ stunning ” clothes and his imperturbable
good-fellowship; but he turns out, under
Thackeray’s unerring draughtsmanhip, a most
genuine and lovable fellow, if a fool. His
dialogue with Pen, after the ball at Gaunt
House, when Pen has airily confessed his inten¬
tion to marry Blanche for her money, is a
masterpiece. The gilded youth, with his
brewery-won wealth and his gallery of girls

PENDENNIS

67

in tights, bursts out into a horrified cry of
anguish at hearing this proposed desecration
of the shrine where he hopelessly but genuinely
adored. Only an author who possessed every
atom of his creation could have written those
two tragic speeches of the “ pretty downy ”
Foker which sadly cheapen the gentlemanliness
of gentlemanly Pen. They are credible, they
are dramatic and at one stroke give Harry
Foker another dimension. They equal any
speech indited by the “ naturally good heart ”
of Tom Jones, and they are infinitely more
touching because of their fumbling diction.
“ But what’s the use of talking? I’m booked
for another race. It’s that kills me, Pen.”
All Tom Jones’s copious appeals to the better
nature of his friend Nightingale do not rise
to the emotional height of these three sen¬
tences, which betray poor Foker’s agony at the
thought of Blanche sacrificed to just such a
worldly engagement as he himself was bound
by; and none of Thackeray’s heart-throbs
over Pen’s dalliance with pretty Fanny do him
half so much credit as these which he placed
behind flashy Mr. Foker’s waistcoat.

Any excursus on Thackeray’s women would
need a wider sweep than the confines of

68 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Pendennis, within which I shall remain ; and
the noble lady of Esmond, Becky Sharp and
the simple Amelia could hardly be excluded
from such a discussion. Thackeray was not
very curious of variety in women, and, though
he studied his chief female characters with the
same patient fidelity as his male, his women
tend to sort themselves into the noble and
affectionate, the affected and worldly, and the
stagy and more or less improper. Blanche
Amory, the puss, of Pendennis, is a delightful
figure of comedy, with her arch wiles, her
snatches of French and her emotions, but beside
Becky Sharp she appears rather frivolous:
one might damage the wings of that butterfly
in trying to examine them too closely. The
Fotheringay, of course, is a wonderful study
of that type of executive artist which, in the
form of a woman, is distractingly beautiful,
immensely energetic and absolutely insensible.
She is like some adorable steam-roller, in¬
exhaustibly supplied with the fuel of health,
good spirits and humourless common-sense,
which functions amazingly when directed by
the brains of some invisible driver, as the
Fotheringay by poor little Bows; and when
there is nobody at the wheel she goes on
blandly and blindly flattening people out.

PENDENNIS

69

Her conversation during the Chatteris episode,
especially in her philosophic pacification of the
outraged Costigan, is quite classic; and when
that episode is over, Thackeray, with his usual
tact, relegates her to the position of a “ walker-
on.” As for Fanny, her creator really exhausts
all there is to be said of her, the sentimental
(if only potential) grisette. Many people think
that he said too much, and perhaps they are
not far wrong.

There only remain, in the first rank, Helen
Pendennis and Laura, who form a kind of
indivisible entity, or Siamese twinSj of the
angelic persuasiojv cr-ushingl yaffectionate, be¬
nignly jealous, irritatingly long-suffering and
extremely ignorant. Laura only exists to
supply the necessary punitive aspect, when
Pen needs castigation, to this otherwise in¬
variably tender and sensitive maternal coun¬
tenance, and, after Helen’s death has severed
the connection, to supply Arthur’s children,
eventually, with a similar guardian. Few
people, at all events of a more modern genera¬
tion, can have read Pendennis without some
internal exclamations of annoyance at
Thackeray’s attitude to Pern's adoring but
unwise mother. She was obviously just as
trying in her way as old Lisbeth Bede. George

70

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Eliot, being a woman, would have made no
bones about saying so; and the effect would
have been a great deal better, for, in truth, the
reader feels a far deeper sympathy for Adam’s
mother than for Pen’s. Yet we must not be
unjust to Thackeray, who was a man, not a
demi-god, and had certain tender spots in his
heart, the touching of which did not neutralise
his skill or unnerve his art, but induced him to
couple the normal diapason with a tremolo
stop of the vox humana type. Helen Pendennis
draws out that stop every time, and we should
appreciate her more if Thackeray had re¬
strained his tendency to lachrymose heaven¬
ward glances on her behalf. Indeed, the
discerning reader can hardly help perceiving,
in spite of his discomfort at Thackeray’s senti¬
mental apostrophes, that Helen Pendennis is
one of the truest characters that he ever
depicted. The modern age of motor-cars,
telegrams and telephones has speeded up
mothers considerably, making them less inno¬
cent and perhaps less long-suffering; but,
given Mrs. Pendennis’ date, her history, her
widowhood, her country seclusion and her
only son, who can deny that in her every
motion and thought, in her susceptibility, her
partisanship, her self-sacrifice, her injustice

PENDENNIS

7*

and her want of worldly wisdom she is abso¬
lutely true and living? The world has not
so far advanced that memories of many such
grandmothers are extinct. If Thackeray never
gave us a scene like that of Lisbeth fretting
Adam Bede, and if he tearfully condoned
Helen’s foibles, at least he never falsified
them. As he reveals her nearly irretrievable
weakness over the Fotheringay, so he exhibits
her awful descent upon Pen’s sick-bed, her
cruelty to Fanny and her dumb resentment that
Pen should have a secret in his heart hidden
from her. His tenderness was excessive, but
not misplaced, for he knew where and how
deep the thorns enter a mother’s heart where
an only son is concerned. When, at the height
of Pen’s first passion, she finds him writing in
his bed and takes the boy in her arms, soothing
and comforting him, we are not ashamed to
be moved; and we do not read without com¬
punction, if we are men, the description of
her troubled days at the German spa when

“ poor Pen was most constant and affectionate
in waiting upon his mother whose wounded
bosom yearned with love towards him, though
there was a secret between them, and an
anguish or rage almost on the mother’s part,

72 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

to think that she was dispossessed somehow of
her son’s heart, or that there were recesses in it
which she must not or dared not enter. She
sickened as she thought of the sacred days of
boyhood when it had not been so—when her
Arthur’s heart had no secrets, and she was his
all in all: when he poured his hopes and
pleasures, his childish griefs, vanities, triumphs
into her willing and tender embrace; when
her home was his nest still; and before fate,
selfishness, nature, had driven him forth on
wayward wings—to range on his own flight—
to sing his own song—and to seek his own
home and his own mate.”

Thackeray’s patient realism, howeve r, has
another side to it. If it accou nts- for - the -finish
and perfection of his character-drawing, it has
a depressing effect, in Pendennis at least, upon
his more descriptive passages. This is par¬
ticularly evident in the chapters which give an
extensive view of a young man’s life in London
—Pen in chambers with Warrington, the
harmony in the Back Kitchen, Captain Shan-
don and the coulisses of journalism, and the
manoeuvres and hangers-on of Bacon and
Bungay. These chapters are not in the least
dull; indeed, besides accuracy, they have

PENDENNIS

73

humour and vivacity enough; but if you put
them beside similar chapters of Dickens they
seem to be strangely dead. Dickens’ extra¬
ordinary rapture, no doubt, translated every¬
thing he saw and enjoyed even what would
normally be unenjoyable, but when Thackeray
writes of what he himself had observed as if
he were carefully reintegrating the life of some
young spark in unburied Pompeii, one would
sacrifice a good deal of accuracy for an ounce
of Dickens’ gusto. On comparing Thackeray’s
general description of the Temple in Chapter
XXIX with the cognate passage in Martin
Chuzzlewit , or with Lamb’s essay on the old
benchers of the Inner Temple, the difference of
tone is immediately apparent. The Temple
and its inhabitants brim with life in Lamb
and Dickens, but in Pendennis it has the
atmosphere of a graveyard in which Pen and
Warrington have unaccountably chosen to
defy the ghosts of the Grumps and Paleys
whom Thackeray so mournfully depicts. Or
take the introduction to Shepherd’s Inn:

“ somewhere behind the black gables and
smutty chimney-stacks of Wych Street, Holy-
well Street, Chancery Lane, the quadrangle
lies, hidden from the outer world; and it is

74

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

approached by curious passages and ambiguous
smoky alleys, on which the sun has forgotten
to shine. Slop-sellers, brandy-ball and hard¬
bake vendors, purveyors of theatrical prints
for youth, dealers in dingy furniture, and
bedding suggestive of anything but sleep, line
the narrow walls and dark casements with their
wares. The doors are many-belled: and
crowds of dirty children form endless groups
about the steps: or around the shellfish-
dealers’ trays in these courts; whereof the
damp pavements resound with pattens, and
are drabbled with a never-failing mud. Ballad-
singers come and chant here, in deadly gut¬
tural tones, satirical songs against the Whig
Administration, against the bishops and dig¬
nified clergy, against the German relatives of
an august royal family: Punch sets up his
theatre, sure of an audience, and occasionally
of a halfpenny from the swarming occupants
of the houses: women scream after their
children for loitering in the gutter, or, worse
still, against the husband who comes reeling
from the gin-shop;—there is a ceaseless din
and life in these courts, out of which you pass
into the tranquil, old-fashioned quadrangle of
Shepherd’s Inn. In a mangy little grass-plat
in the centre rises up the statue of Shepherd,

PENDENNIS

75

defended by iron railings from the assaults of
boys. . .

How admirable it is, how classic and how
cold! In transcribing the passage I have
relished again the deft choice of epithets and
the perfect phrasing of the sentences. But
something is wanting, nevertheless, and that
something is what you find, superabundantly
perhaps, in Dickens when he is revelling in the
glorious grime round Todgers’s, and in William
de Morgan when he is lingering in Tallack
Street. Nor is it only wanting in his geo¬
graphical passages, but nearly always when,
in Pendennis, he is surveying a general scene of
common life. One may except, perhaps, the
ball at Baymouth—though it is not to be
compared with the ball in Emma —and cer¬
tainly the rattling account of the bustle attend¬
ing the Glaverings’ arrival at Clavering Park;
but one is nearly always conscious of it in the
middle and later stages of the book, most
especially at the famous dinner given by
Bungay in the Row, where Thackeray shows
himself a very finished “ quizz,” to use a
phrase of his day, but fails to make the function
go, because he gives the impression of a
satirical showman exhibiting a collection of

76 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

curious aborigines in a pen, with a special
knowledge due to having lived among them
and the ample suggestion that he now moves
in more civilised circles. With how different
a spirit does Balzac, who had as clear an eye
and as wide an experience if less patience, set
to work when he takes us behind the scenes of
journalism in Illusions Perdues ! The rapidity
of Lucien’s success and disaster may be unreal
there, in the sense that an accelerated film is
unreal, but the unreal tempo does not seriously
falsify the picture. Compare Balzac’s mar¬
vellous description of the seething life of the
Palais Royal, of Lousteau and Blondet, of
D’Arthez and Chrestien, of Lucien’s first
dramatic article and of the supper at Florine’s,
with Thackeray’s office of the Pall Mall
Gazette, Shandon and his prospectus, Bacon’s
negotiations, Bungay’s dinner, Popjoy, Wagg
and the rest—and it is difficult not to feel that
the Englishman was holding his pen with cold
fingers.

Pendennis shows, more than any other of his
great books, the strange absence of some
warming principle in Thackeray which has
done a disproportionate injury to his popu¬
larity and obscured the true greatness of his
art, in England certainly and still more abroad.

PENDENNIS

77

There are some admirers who, like Professor
Saintsbury, perhaps compensate this deficiency
by unconsciously transferring some of their
own abundant warmth to the reading of
Thackeray; there are others to whose cast of
mind Thackeray’s coolness is congenial; but
there are many more, I fear, who have been
rendered antagonistic even to his manifest
triumphs by their instinctive recognition of his
constitutional deficiency. He fell seriously ill,
it is true, while writing Pendennis, but that does
not explain all. To say, as was commonly
said in his lifetime, that he was a cynic explains
nothing, because it is not true. Nobody who
believed so utterly in the possibility of human's
virtue and charity and unselfishness, how¬
soever rare, could be called a cynic. It was
something more mysterious than cynicism
which made him, for instance, suddenly hold
up Smirke’s hidden love for Mrs. Pendennis
as a type of all human cares.

“ Mr. Smirke has a private care watching at
his bedside, and sitting behind him on his
pony; and is no more satisfied than the rest
of us. How lonely we are in the world! how
selfish and secret, everybody! You and your
wife have pressed the same pillow for forty

78 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

years and fancy yourselves united.—Psha, does
she cry out when you have the gout, or do you
lie awake when she has the toothache? Your
artless daughter, seemingly all innocence and
devoted to her mamma and her piano-lesson,
is thinking of neither, but of the young
lieutenant with whom she danced at the last
ball—the honest frank boy just returned from
school is secretly speculating upon the money
you will give him, and the debts he owes the
tart-man. The old grandmother crooning in
the corner, and bound to another world within
a few months, has some business or cares which
are quite private and her own . . . and, as
for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer
and say—Do you tell her all ? Ah, sir—a
distinct universe walks about under your hat
and under mine—all things in nature are
different to each—the woman we look at has
not the same features, the dish we eat from has
not the same taste to the one and the other—
you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations,
with some fellow-islands a little more or less
near to us.”

It was something more mysterious which
made him appear so determined to show up,
in spite of his unconcealed pride that he had

PENDENNIS

79

all this sufficient inside knowledge from long
familiarity, the seamy side of nearly everything
that has a brilliant appearance—dukes and
country gentlemen, Society ladies, popular
bachelors, divine actresses, the innocence of
youth, filial devotion, a university career,
success at the Bar, the editing of newspapers,
the publishing of books, the pleasure of writing,
the sweetness of idling, the exhilaration of
work—as if his features worked into a grimace
whenever he considered any position, object
or activity which anyone could have loved
or anyone desired. For, through all these
methodical exposures, brilliantly executed as
they are, one sees, not a cynic washing his
hands of the world, but a disappointed idealist
disconsolately wringing them.

Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in his book on
Dickens, speaks in passing of Thackeray’s
“ reverent scepticism.” This phrase, perhaps,
is apt and compendious, but it goes really very
little way towards explaining the chill some¬
where in Thackeray’s marrow which, some¬
times imperceptibly, sometimes obviously,
sicklies over the robustness of his work. We
know of his great domestic tragedy but we
shall never know enough of Thackeray’s inner
life to lay our finger surely upon the cause

80 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

and the place of the flaw. Its hidden presence
is revealed in Pendennis, not only by the ex¬
posures of seamy sides, but in the characteristic
soliloquies of the author, which often burst
upon the reader unawares, like squalls out of
clear sky—the groans of a heart that can no
longer stifle its oppression.

“ It was the first step in life that Pen was
making—Ah! what a dangerous journey it is,
and how the bravest may stumble and the
strongest fail. Brother wayfarer! may you
have a kind arm to support yours on the path,
and a friendly hand to succour those who fall
beside you. May truth guide, mercy forgive
at the end, and love accompany always.
Without that lamp how blind the traveller
would be, and how black and cheerless the
journey! ”

These ominous words introduce Arthur to
Oxford. We have another “alas!” at the
beginning of the next chapter over the selfish¬
ness and impurity of men, and later on in the
same come two pages of melancholy reflection
on the havoc that time plays with the friends
of our youth.

“ Fate has interposed darkly, and the young

PENDENNIS

81

voices are silent, and the eager brains have
ceased to work. This one had genius and a
great descent, and seemed to be destined for
honours which arc now of little worth to him:
that had virtue, learning, genius—every faculty
and endowment which might secure love,
admiration, and worldly fame: an obscure
and solitary churchyard contains the grave of
many fond hopes, and the pathetic stone which
bids them farewell—I saw the sun shining on
it in the fall of last year, and heard the sweet
village choir raising anthems round about.
What boots whether it be Westminster or a little
country spire which covers your ashes, or if, a
few days sooner or later, the world forgets you ? ”

Other dirges follow, not only over the
hollowness of success, but over the tendency of
love and truth to grow dim in human life,
over the awe which must possess a man who
looks back on childhood and reflects that he is
the same, over the vanity of riches which an
heir is waiting to inherit; and all are crowned
by the tremendous dialogue in Chapter LXI,
where Pen develops the creed of a sceptic to
Warrington, and Thackeray’s remorseful in¬
dictment of Sadduceeism which follows it.
Thackeray speaks:

82 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

“To what, we say, does this scepticism lead?
It leads a man to shameful loneliness and
selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful,
because it is so good-humoured and con¬
scienceless and serene. Conscience! What
is conscience? Why accept remorse? What
is public or private faith ? Mythuses alike
enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing
and acknowledging the lies of the world,
Arthur, as see them you can with only too
fatal a clearness, you submit to them without
any protest further than a laugh: if, plunged
yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole
wretched world to pass groaning by you un¬
moved : if the fight for the truth is taking
place, and all men of honour are on the ground
armed on one side or the other, and you alone
are to lie on your balcony and smoke your
pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had
better have died, or never been at all, than
such a sensual coward.”

It is Thackeray’s stricken soul arguing with
itself, and he allows Arthur, grown to the
stature of Mephistopheles, to answer him
imperturbably with the long speech begin¬
ning: “The truth, friend! Where is the
truth? ”

Other great men have uttered similar la-

PENDENNIS

83

ments, but few have been so persistently
incapable of self-consolation. Thackeray has
neither the pride of Leopardi, the exultation
of Lucretius nor the Preacher’s acquiescence
in the happiness of work well done. His
mystery is that of an intensely creative mind
unnerved, and of a man made to enjoy but
doomed to lamentation. He desired success,
popularity, friends, love—and he found them:
he knew enthusiasm and the intoxicating joy
of young ambition realised. Yet he writes as
one who has no love, who has spurned am¬
bition and whose enthusiasm has turned to
bitterness. Nevertheless, he could write his
great novels, surveying large tracts of life with
unfailing penetration, creating his characters
with never-wearying care, vicariously sym¬
pathising with every emotion and desire of
human hearts. The mere extent of his art,
into which so much observation, humour and
eloquence were thrown, should have been the
very affirmation with which to overthrow his
doubts and warm his soul. But for Thackeray
this could not be, and the tongue of fire he
needed, which would have made him, not a
finer artist, but a greater poet, never de¬
scended upon him. For the great poets come
near to all men, but Thackeray, to use his own
words, remained an infinite isolation.

IV

THE EGOIST

Some critics of to-day would, I believe,
register scorn on hearing that any novel of
George Meredith’s could be reckoned under the
head of enchantment, and one might go so far
with them as to admit that the effect which
Meredith counted upon issuing from the stroke
of Comedy was something more robust and
intellectual; but scorn for George Meredith’s
work in general only rebounds upon the
scornful. The literary fortunes of such a writer
are bound to vary with successive currents of
taste and opinion, but that they will ever
approach bankruptcy is certainly not to be
thought of.

To his readers of any particular moment,
whether they be few or many, Meredith’s
reputation may safely be left. He demands of
them education, the faculty of steady reflection,
an interest in ideas rather than incidents and a
somewhat abnormal promptitude in following

84

THE EGOIST

85

metaphor. He gives them a great deal in
return. If it be true that the psychological
effect of great art is the organisation of good
impulses in the percipient, then Meredith’s
art is great, for the impulses which it organises
✓are those of liberty, enthusiasm, healthy-
mlndeclness, alertness, sell-discipline and wise
laughter at folly. He was a penetrating reader
of human mofives and a keen critic of outworn
dogmas. Tyranny, pedantry and sloth of
mind or body were abhorrent to him, and it was
to lashing these and encouraging their opposites
that he united his analytical power and his
poetic vision. In the name of Comedy he was
a moralist, but he gave his morals the form of
art. Many of the causes for which he fought
have triumphed since his day : in fact, the
state of society which excited his irony is as
extinct as the Austrian domination of Italy.
Yet the art remains, with its shining virtues
and its obvious defects—the art of Vittoria no
less than that of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,
Evan Harrington, Harry Richmond, Diana of the
Crossways, Beauchamp's Career and The Egoist.

His defects may repel, but there is surely
enough in this list—of his major works alone—
to outweigh, if not to cancel, any just repulsion.
His frequent over-emphasis and boisterous

86

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

flights of a peculiar fancy, his exaggerated
dislike for the obvious and the trite, his faulty
ear for the cadences of English prose, an
occasional grossness or want of fine taste, and
a technique in dialogue which produces an
effect of unreality, even, sometimes, of absurdity
—these are the main heads of legitimate blame.
We need not blink them, if we remember that
George Meredith, like Carlyle, like Charles
Lamb and—one might truly say—like Shake¬
speare, was so compounded as necessarily to be
a mannerist. His mental progresses were ab¬
normal, to an extent of which he, of course,
was quite unconscious. He did not willingly'
torture our English tongue, nor deliberately
intend to daze our minds with fantasias of
elliptical imagery and irritate us with that
somewhat garish verbal repartee which figured,
for him as “ wit,” preferably Celtic. The very
gifts which gave him originality and an
individual coign of critical vantage made him
also, at times, volcanically obscure, bombastic,
and difficult of comprehension. However;
much we may regret his projection of his
peculiar self into his work, it is of little use to
protest against it or state it as a flat condemna¬
tion. It was inevitable. Moreover, if Mere¬
dith’s prose is often involved, difficult and

THE EGOIST

87

inharmonious, his thought is not obscure. A
little patience will always find the thread,
which is never trivial nor unworthy. But he
was a rhapsodist as well as a thinker, and one
must hear and see the rhapsodist. The face
and the voice of George Meredith, if we had
known them, would have made many a rough
place smooth.

I may, perhaps, confess a personal prefer¬
ence for The Egoist without defending my
preference in detail. A general vote would
place it high, in any case. In one of his'
letters Meredith said th at it c ontained but half
himself and that his friend would' like The
Amazing Marriage better. His meaning is clear.
In The Egoist he suppressed, or tried to sup¬
press, the rhapsodist, the gargantuan humours,
the imaginative acrobatics. He used the
eagle’s eye but pinioned its wings. He con¬
strained himself, like his Muse of Comedy
handling the great Book of Earth, to “condense
whole sections in a sentence and volumes in a
character” : he focussed his gaze upon a narrow
scene and a short span of time.^His concen¬
tration was not in vain : it gave firmness to Bis
construction, ease to his narrative, brilliance
to his portraiture and finality to his argument.
Perhaps that is why The Egoist lasts so well, in

88

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

spite of its faded Victorian setting. The top-
Shats and strapped trousers, the shawls and veils
jand ample skirts, the heavy dinner-parties, the
riding hacks, the barouches, the secluded park-
; existence have passed away; men have no
rights, women no reticences, and both sexes,
having no taste for elegant verbal fence amid
suave avenues, frankly pound one another with
j hard-hit tennis balls. The circumstances that
i compounded a Willoughby Patterne are
already legendary, and he himself appears
almost as preposterous as a Polynesian image
in a museum, yet the essential comedy remains
to engage our emotions as freshly as ever,
because Meredith has made Willoughby’s
self-delusions and discomfitures the symbol of
that eternal comedy which is played by the
dominating impulses of man. The Egoist. has¬
t y lasting eff ect upon an inte llige nt reader.,-
stimulating netv ^einutioHsr~arousing reco gni-_
tions, untangfi7ig~l5ohftr5i^^ muid and

thus^working hrliinr "s change which may
outlive any particular memories of it. This is
the unfailing quality of art upon high levels.

The story of The Egoist is a very simple one
in outline. Sir Willoughby Patterne, a young
baronet, wealthy, handsome, witty, who has

THE EGOIST

89

grown up amid the effusive adulation of his
county, is concerned to find a wife and mistress
of Patterne Hall. He had been jilted once by a
girl, who had fled from his too dominating
embraces straight into the arms of another
husband. He himself had jilted Laetitia Dale,
his constant adorer, who still lived and still
adored under her invalid father’s roof, which
was in the park of Patterne. These are pre¬
liminaries. The real action opens with the
capture by Sir Willoughby from among many
admirers of the young, beautiful and spirited
Clara Middleton, daughter of a p edantic o ld
scholar. Clara has begged for six months’
grace before marriage, but has consented to
a solemn plighting of troth. She and Dr.
Middleton come to spend three weeks before
the wedding at Patterne Hall. In all the
circumstances that minister to Sir Willoughby’s
intense self-love Clara sees the glamour which
had won her fall off and reveal a distasteful
tyrant. She is resolved to escape, but finds
the tenacity of Sir Willoughby overpowering.
Her desperate efforts only succeed when they
have driven him, in his acute fear of wounds
to his vanity from the world’s derision, to
indulge in double-dealing, which a chance
discovers. Sir Willoughby’s plan, when he

go SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

found the rebel incorrigible, had been to
marry his adoring Laetitia after all, and
practically to force Clara upon his cousin and
secretary, the scholar Vernon Whitford. What
happens is that he is compelled to release Clara
unconditionally, but to sue on his knees for a
new Laetitia who has learned to see him as he
is, and who lashes him painfully with her
opinion of him before she consents to become,
without love, his wife and helper. Clara and
Vernon Whitford, who had unconsciously
become lovers, pair off with their creator’s
blessing as two who have nobly come through
their ordeal.

This theme of a young girl, entrapped in her
ignorance into an engagement which she soon
finds repulsive and forced into desperate
flounderings to regain her liberty, has nothing
sui'prising or uncommon about it. Any
novelist might adopt it, and we can almost
imagine how a given novelist would treat it.
Thackeray’s drama, for instance, would have
been one of innocence escaping from corruption,
with Clara as the lovely, honest and rather
stupid dove, Sir Willoughby as the brilliant
falcon with a slight odour of disreputability
holding his victim in his claws amid the snig¬
gers of worldly and corrupt society, and

THE EGOIST

9 *

Vernon Whitford as the lowly and steadfast
lover of romance, whose flame is ignored by his
mistress till the day of deliverance. Henry
James, again, would have been tempted to
make Clara an American damsel, some bright-
souled but ignorant Milly from New England,
who had yielded her hand in an ardour of
enthusiasm for the Old World, mysterious,
enchanting, the scene of legend and romance,
of venerable beauty, state and ceremony. She
would have plighted herself simply and
modestly yet with secret passion in what Henry
James called the “ American Scene,” against
which the figure of Sir Willoughby, sauve and
debonair, would have stood out as a deliverer
rescuing a parched maiden from a desolation
of mere modernity. She would have come to
Patterne Hall under the wing, not of a pedant
father, but of a rigid and less impressionable
aunt or confidant, to find that Europe held
poison in its powerful spell. Gradually,
punctuated by agonising debates and hesita¬
tions, the truth would be driven into her un¬
sullied heart that underneath all the inexpress¬
ible loveliness of ancient towers, smiling parks,
exquisite villages, deference, courtliness and
perfect social amenity there was something
rotten and miasmic to which the natives were

92

SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

accustomed, but against which she, bright,
simple Milly, had not been inoculated. She
would be like a fly caught in a web—a web
which Henry James’s imagination could weave
with extraordinary mastery. Every morning
would bring her against some fresh bewilder¬
ment, some moral assumption or some supple
action which, in her light of the New World,
could only appear doubtful and degrading.
And then at last she would fly, with a lovely
resignation, back to her less complicated home,
another victim to the unhealthy fascination of
ancient Europe. And it would have been
through the eye of Vernon Whitford, an
American anglicised and toughened like Henry
James himself, that he might have projected
the whole drama, with infinite and protracted
sympathy for both points of view, and with
a tendency to suggest the moral that Patterne’s
magnificent ease and splendour only just
compensated for its want of Milly’s honest
simplicity. It would have been left vague
whether Vernon, having seen Milly off at
Southampton, remained unrepentant in
Kundry’s garden, or, issuing unostentatiously
by the back-door, returned himself, after a
decent interval, to be purified and marry
Milly-Clara in the bright New England air.

THE EGOIST

93

Anybody can translate the theme of The\
Egoist into other guises ranging from the purely
romantic to the most recent psychoanalytical,!
and it will not be entirely a waste of ingenuity
to do so if, in the light of the process, George
Meredith’s own treatment of his theme is
thrown into relief. The clash between Clara
and Sir Willoughby, as he sees it, is certainly
not one of mere sentiment, nor a conflict
between mere goodness and badness pictur¬
esquely staged to excite emotion. Clara is not
an angel and Sir Willoughby is anything but a
villain : indeed, Meredith is at pains to display
his hero as a thoroughly admirable person,
when judged by common worldly standards,i
and at no less pains to admit, while excusing,!
the danger that a girl of Clara’s temperament,!
“ not pure of nature ” but “ pure of will,”)
may overstep the bounds of delicacy in des-(
perate situations. On the other hand, it is not
purely the situation—what Henry James called
the “case”—which interested Meredith: hej
did not concentrate all his imagination and 1 ,
enthusiasm on heightening by cunning sug-!
gestion and constructive artifice the opposition!
between what Clara and what Sir Willoughby
respectively “ stood for,” just to leave it there
for the spectator’s benefit as a work of art

94 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

| triumphantly “ done.” He was not the artist
i 1 alone, but moralist and judge as well. He was
profoundly concerned with the issue, since he
had stated the case as an example : he
analysed and condemned the human motives
and social practices which caused the crime
before devising a punishment to fit it. He
treated his material with the touch of an artist,
but he chose it with the eye of a philosopher.

In Meredith’s novels it is jthe artist who
constructs , p ainTsj md ocr ^Tnrially-enittfrtirlprs,
Tout it is the moralist who meditates and directs:
.and the moralist, like Dr -""Middle ton in a
happy m o nrl j aot-seldam overpowers his com¬
panion—X-kehlend of these two impulses, if.
not always perfect in practice, was Meredith’s]
ideal and his peculiar virtue as a novelist. 1
In his brilliant prelude to The Egoist, as in his
longer Essay on Comedy, he personified this
ideal in the Comic Spirit, the corrector of
pretentiousness, dulness, and rawness, “ the
ultimate civiliser, the polisher, a sweet cook.”
Meredith’s comedy is no libidinous spirit of
La Dive Bouteille, much less an airily trip¬
ping Good-Humoured Lady, laughing uncon¬
cernedly over the confusion of a company of
masks. She is something a governess; she

THE EGOIST

95

wields a birch rod; she insists upon the laughter
of reason; she illuminates and epitomises the
biggest book on earth, the Book of Egoism.
Her spectacles and her rod instil some portent¬
ousness into her laughter, yet we would not
have her otherwise. She is real, she is unique,
and she has all the merits with which Meredith
endowed her. Of this all his work is proof,
but The Egoist above all.

“ The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who
would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s
expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip
himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a
form, might be taken for the actual person. . . .

“ You may as well know him out of hand, as
a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth
and station; a not flexile figure, do what we
may with him. . . .

“ Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the
House. It would appear that ever finer
essences of it are demanded to sustain the
structure; but especially it would appear that
a reversion to the gross original, beneath a
mask and in a vein of fineness, is an earthquake
at the foundations of the House.”

These passages from the last page of the
Prelude give the essence of the case as Meredith

9 6 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

stated it. His misdemeanant is not the egoist in
general, but an egoist whom the refinement of
civilisation should have purged of his grossness.
He indicts his Sir Willoughby, an outwardly
exquisite production of breeding, education
and fortune, for relapsing into the state of
cave-primitiveness in his behaviour to women.
Moreover, as a radical patriot, he is moved to
tilt at the conditions of country-gentleman-
hood, as being the hotbed of a retrograde and
unworthy self-love, of stiff-necked conserva¬
tism, pompousness and injustice. He pictures
the gentleman as beset by imps, ready to
plague him into an antic dance on the first
outbreak of his almost inevitable folly. The
dance which his imps led Sir Willoughby is the
gist of his novel, and it gains its power from the
fact that in Sir Willoughby’s capers, remorse¬
lessly described, each of us recognises some
figures in the particular tarantella to which his
own vanity is prone to sting him. „

Meredith presents his story as a satirical
comedy of society, which was to be swift and
lucid, full of brilliant dialogue and rich in
dramatic surprises. Throughout the book,
from his boisterous fantasia on Mrs. Mount-
stuart Jenkinson’s remark that Willoughby

THE EGOIST

97

had “ a leg ” to the scene at the end where a
drawing-roomful of characters is held for
inordinate length at cross purposes, one con¬
tinually catches him figuratively rubbing his
hands at his enthusiastic view of the corusca¬
tion which he fanned with an endearing but
irritating assiduity. For so penetrating a mind
Meredith was, in some respects, profoundly
ingenuous, and never more so than when, with
naive delight, he is exploiting a character like
Colonel de Craye, the dashing Irish officer
with a gift for elaborate verbal repartee and
Celtic hyperbole. This woman-killer, who
is introduced that Willoughby, Laetitia Dale
and Vernon Whitford may all falsely suspect
Clara of meditating flight with him, crackles
intolerably, and all with the air of being the
most brilliant stage-rattle since Congreve’s
day. The depressing effect which he had
whenever he appears is pathetic, and the worst
is that he affects the other characters whenever
they come into contact with him. He pricks
Willoughby into exploding preposterous squibs
of his own, and his effect on poor Clara is
sadly apparent in the climax of their dialogue
on horseback.

“ De Craye was heated by his gallop to

H

98 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

venture on the angling question : ‘ Am I to
hear the names of the bridesmaids? ’

“ The pace had nerved Clara to speak to it
sharply : ‘ There is no need.’

“ ‘ Have I no claim? ’

“ She was mute.

“ ‘ Miss Lucy Darleton, for instance; whose
name I am almost as much in love with as
Crossjay.’

“ * She will not be bridesmaid to me.’

“‘She declines? Add my petition, I
beg.’

“‘To all? or to her?’

“ ‘ Do all the bridesmaids decline? ’

“ ‘ The scene is too ghastly.’

“ ‘ A marriage? ’

“ ‘ Girls have grown sick of it.’

“ ‘ Of weddings ? We’ll overcome the
sickness.’

“ ‘ With some.’

“ ‘ Not with Miss Darleton? You tempt
my eloquence.’

“ ‘ You wish it? ’

“ ‘ To win her consent? Certainly.’

“ ‘ The scene ! ’

“ ‘ Do I wish that? ’

“ ‘ Marriage ! ’ exclaimed Clara, dashing
into the ford, etc. . . .”

THE EGOIST

99

It must be put down as a weakness of
Meredith’s that he was apt to get more fun out
of his comic characters than he managed to
give his readers; and in The Egoist, in spite
of touches which are truly comic, we must
write down most of Dr. Middleton, the ped¬
antic bear, timorous of women and fond of
port, Dr. Corney, another purveyor of Celtic
wit, the impossible conversation at luncheon
where Lady Culmer and Lady Busshe are
mystified by de Craye and the final delirium
in the drawing-room round poor, dazed Mr.
Dale, on the side of this weakness. These are
not Comedy but a kind of elevated buffoonery,
which is out of tune. Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson would have hit the mark if she had
said of her creator, “ he has an uncertain ear.”
Capable of exquisite beauty and true wit,
Meredith too often fell short of both by striving
too mightily for them, like the tenor in Balzac’s
story, who, in a supreme effort to surpass his
own art for his mistress’s ear, made, in effect,
the most painful noises.

Nevertheless, when these lapses and over¬
insistences are eliminated, there remains a
residue that may worthily be called High
Comedy. The preparation for the main action
—apart from the leg-fantasia—is swift and

100 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

pointed. Willoughby is admirably introduced,
and the episode of Constantia, and of Wil¬
loughby’s wooing of Laetitia on the rebound,
but only to jilt her, are presented to us with a
light hand and easy mastery. The essentials
of Willoughby, though a trifle over-satirised,
are in our minds before Clara arrives on the
scene. We see him pampered and selfish,
capable of brutal rudeness to a kinsman,
painfully sensitive to the world’s tongue,
and obstinately retentive of a woman’s heart,
Laetitia’s, which he insists on holding without
paying for it. The account in the fourth
chapter of Willoughby’s voyage and of his
ecstatic greetings to Laetitia on return, with
the final picture of a constant woman, dis¬
appointed but adoring, is one of the most
effective passages that Meredith ever wrote.
And when Clara appears, her chase and
capture, the birth of her first doubts, Wil¬
loughby’s impatience to dominate her mind
entirely, his overpowering possessiveness—“ He
led her about the flower-beds; too much as
if he were giving a convalescent an airing ”—
his naive obstinacy in exposing the worst of
himself with entire complacency, and the
particular examples of his selfishness—his
tyrannous behaviour to the boy 'Crossjay and

iTHE EGOIST

IOI

his callous schemes to retain Vernon as his
useful dependent—are told quickly and
pointedly with a flash of humour blended with
scorn which is Meredith’s own. With the two
pages of wrathful reflection upon the egoist
in the love-season, Clara’s run with Crossjay
and her thought, “ were I to marry, and run ! ”,
her vision of Vernon under the wild cherry
and their talk, she eager and he obtuse, of
mountains and of liberty, the final touches are
given to the setting for the main action,
Clara’s revolt and victory, Willoughby’s re¬
sistance and speciously covered defeat, which
lasts for the economical space of seven days.

This main action is artistically conceived.
Clara’s pathetic attempts to substitute Laetitia
for herself and to obtain release by mere asking,
their consummate parrying by Willoughby
and her father’s surrender to old port, lead to
her flight in the rain. Her change of mind at
the station and return, unrepentant, to a
Willoughby dismayed by the sense of things
working against him mark the turning-point.
From the moment when Willoughby “ fluted
exceedingly ” to Laetitia, like a knight in
armour attempting pathos, he becomes the
sport of the imps. He tries to play two games,
that of holding Clara and tempting Vernon to

io2 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

marry Laetitia, and that of seeking refuge
in the heart over which his power had never
failed while adroitly contriving to cast Clara to
Vernon as a bone to a dog. He is riddled by
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson’s wit, stung by
Lady Busshe’s vulgarity, and driven to make
himself ridiculous to Laetitia while still in¬
flamed by Clara’s beauty; he is refused,
incredibly, by his faithful adorer, he is again
tempted by Clara, he is betrayed by Crossjay,
routed by Mrs. Jenkinson and finally brought
to his knees by Laetitia. Only by abject sub¬
mission is the Egoist’s face saved to the world.
It was a brilliant conception and, in many
details, was brilliantly carried out. What,
indeed, could be finer comedy of purest
inspiration than, for example, Willoughby’s
preparation of Laetitia’s mind (Chapter XIV)
to marry another without losing her devotion
to himself, or Clara’s dialogue with Whitford
at the railway inn, or Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson’s good-humoured thrusts in Chapter
XXXIV; and what, in the realm of grace
and charm, could be better than Clara’s dia¬
logues with Crossjay, and the beautiful pre¬
sentation of the boy’s character in Crossjay
himself, one of the few personages who does
not appear too often?

THE EGOIST

103

Yes, there is Comedy enough in The Egoist,
both in its conception and execution ; there is
much happy—as well as unhappy—dialogue,
notably that of Clara with Laetitia and with
Vernon; there is a light grace of youth in
Crossjay and even poetry in the description of
Clara advancing over the lawn, “ a sight to set
the woodland dancing, and turn the heads of
the town.” Yet, if Comedy were all, one would
have to say it was Comedy got singularly out
of hand and flouting all the canons of comic
proportion.

Fifty chapters is a long run for a Comic
Spirit which “ conceives a definite situation
for a number of characters, and rejects all
accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them, and
their speech.” There are two audiences to
every dramatic presentation, the fictitious
audience of the characters themselves and the
real audience of the spectators or readers.
Meredith, with his ebullient imagination and
his passionately communicative mind, could
never peg himself down to that economy
which ensures that the amount of explanation
sufficient to prime the fictitious audience with
its necessary intelligence of the action shall
also be sufficient for the real audience. Being
a philosopher and a moralist, his eye was fixed

104 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

upon his real audience, whom he suspected,
not without some reason, of having an intelli¬
gence and a power of seizing illuminating con¬
nections of ideas far below his own. He felt
himself bound to enlighten them, like the
conftrencier in a revue, with comments on the
inner meaning of the passing show and dis¬
quisitions upon human nature, as exemplified
in his drama. That is why the skirts of his
Comedy are so voluminous; he puffs them out
continually with the wind of his own spirit.

These philosophical or analytical interpola¬
tions are the things which, above all, give
Meredith’s novels their particular character.
Not to appreciate them is not to appreciate
Meredith, for they are the essential distillations
of his mind; and though they hamper the
dash and velocity with which, in his intention,
the action should have been endowed, they
enrich immeasurably the content of the whole
work, giving it massiveness, durability and a
hold upon the higher regions of the mind.
The Egoist would be only a pale ghost of itself
without these typical contributions from its
author, and there are few of them that we could
wish away. Who, for instance, would willingly
expunge the wisdom with which the classic
fourteenth chapter—“ Sir Willoughby and

THE EGOIST

105

Laetitia ”—opens? “In the hundred and
fourth chapter of the thirteenth volume of the
Book of Egoism it is written : Possession with¬
out obligation to the object possessed ap¬
proaches felicity.” The brilliant enlargement
upon this text, which reveals at once the
acuteness and amplitude of Meredith’s vision,
is both an admirable piece of philosophy in
itself and a good preparation for the ensuing
dialogue. Chapter XXIII, again, calls a
protracted halt, but not a halt without profit.
The disquisition upon the human delusion
that good fruit will come of the union of
temper and policy, and the penetrating analysis
of Willoughby’s form of the delusion, if it is an
excrescence upon pure form, is exhilaratingly
shrewd. In how many injured minds is not
Willoughby’s day-dream of magnanimous
triumph over a discomfited and too late
repentant Clara most accurately repeated ?
And who has more eloquently chastised his
sex’s Weakness than Meredith in the con¬
cluding pages of this chapter, with his picture
of Willoughby “ flaming verdigris ” and his
rebuke to primitive masculinity? “Women
have us back to the conditions of primitive
man, or they shoot us higher than the top¬
most star. But it is as we please. . . . They

io6 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

are to us what we hold of best or worst within.
By their state is our civilisation judged: and
if it is hugely animal still, that is because
primitive men abound and will have their
pasture.” A similar long halt is called at the
thirty-ninth chapter—“ In the Heart of the
Egoist ”—which is a notable sermon on egoism
full of arrows that fly to the conscience of
every man. It shows Willoughby, in an agony
of self-pity, deciding that Clara must be given
up and planning with a dark diplomacy how
she shall be so given up as to appear discarded;
and, in parenthesis, Meredith reflects upon
primitive man and society in striking metaphors
which do not conceal his unerring intelligence,
pointing to primitive man as the prime egoist
and presenting Willoughby as the socialised
development of this elementary being, who
has discovered a “ greater realm than that of
the sensual appetites.”

“ He slew imagination ”—what a lightning
stroke, and how it hits each man of us ! Who
can lay his hand on his heart and say that, in
converse with a woman, he has never “dragged
her through the labyrinths of his penetralia ”
and wilfully, insistently, slain imagination ?

There are other and slighter passages of
this kind in The Egoist which hold the quintes-

THE EGOIST

107

sence of Meredithianism. The reader knows
them or can find them for himself. It is to be
noted that they are not sheer digressions in
Sterne’s Shandean manner, but, though they
may include some moralisation in general,
they are in the main an illumination of
character, especially of the leading characters,
Willoughby and Clara.

And this consideration leads us to a closer
view of those two characters, as Meredith so
fully presented them to us. Nobody, of course,
can read The Egoist without experiencing a deep
and lasting impression of Willoughby and
Clara. They are types which we know to be
true, and peculiarly English, in essentials, if
not in every detail. So vivid, indeed, are both
of them that many a reader, by a natural pro¬
cess of mind, is drawn to think of them as real,
to estimate their characters and react emotion¬
ally to their vicissitudes as if they were historical
personages or his own acquaintances. These
estimates and these reactions are coloured by
the reader’s own personality, for it is by our¬
selves, and not by impersonal standards, that
we judge all people, especially our friends and
our enemies. We cannot help ourselves in this
respect, and the novelist encourages us; for
it is an unsuccessful narrator who does not

io8 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

stimulate his hearers to adopt these personal
and emotional attitudes towards the figments
of his brain. His success is the quality which
we call vividness. Yet, after all, this vividness,
in a novel, is the creation of one mind and not
life itself; and therefore the greater the vivid¬
ness of the characters, the more interesting it is,
if possible, to hold our personal reactions in
abeyance for a moment and to observe exactly
how and with what intention, with what
felicities and what inconsistencies, our novelist
has presented them. It is a task for second or
third reading, and often attended with surprises,
convicting us not seldom of inattention and un¬
founded prejudice. Such an observation of
those interesting characters, Sir Willoughby
Patterne, Clara Middleton and Laetitia Dale,
could only be elaborated in writing at un¬
pardonable length : but one or two notes may,
perhaps, be attempted as instances of these
observations—let us not call them analysis,
which is an ugly word, savouring of coldness,
chemistry, and glamour dissipated. Truly they
are not dissections of dead bones but researches
into the secrets of intense life.

Meredith presented his leading characters
in two ways—from the outside, by recounting

THE EGOIST

109

their speech and actions, and from the inside <
by placing us, he playing Virgil to our Dante,
inside the tortuous passages of their minds, to
observe at length the thoughts and passions
and fancies working within them. His minor
characters are presented from the outside only;
and it is an interesting, though rather baffling,
light upon Vernon Whitford that Meredith
hardly ever takes us inside his mind, and then
but briefly. If this is why Vernon seems an
oddly flat and angular character, one wonders
why Meredith so presented Clara’s successful
lover. Yet the effect is undeniable : the shy,
awkward, intellectual, scrupulously honest
scholar, singularly obtuse to a woman’s mean¬
ing and distrustful of emotion, is wonderfully
vivid seen in his two dimensions against the
full three dimensions of Willoughby and the
two ladies. Of Willoughby and Clara, how¬
ever, is it not true that, whereas the external
presentation of the former—a necessarily
satirical presentation—is exaggerated even to
absurdity while the internal presentation is
profound and convincing, with the latter it is
just the reverse? Meredith’s Clara, as seen
and heard, wins every heart, but when he takes
us into her mind, our mentor becomes over¬
powering, for so impressed is he with the con-

no SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

fusion of a young and spirited girl’s thoughts
that he must make the confusion worse by his
flood of metaphors.

Willoughby has often been thought pre¬
posterous ; and so he is, if you only regard his
conversation. Meredith wished to present him
as a man of brilliant gifts and impressive
personality, as one not unworthy of the
neighbourhood’s admiration; yet if you read
aloud the speeches put into his mouth from
the very beginning, it is impossible to give them
an intonation which makes them seem other
than comic. They are the speeches of a
“ character ” part, of an intolerably pompous
and stilted fellow whose absurdity no Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson would have missed for
an instant. Hear him when he greets Laetitia
after his return from a long voyage.

“ He sprang to the ground and seized her
hand. ‘ Laetitia Dale ! ’ he said. He panted.
‘ Your name is sweet English music ! And
you are well ? ’ The anxious question per¬
mitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He
found the man he sought there, squeezed him
passionately, and let her go. . . .”

These few lines epitomise the whole contrast
between the two presentations of Willoughby.

THE EGOIST

hi

By his words he stamps himself an affected
nincompoop; and then follows the thrust of
Meredith’s true wit. “ He found the man he
sought there, squeezed him passionately, and
let her go.” It is the biting presentation of the
inner Willoughby, of masculine egoism drama¬
tised, which makes him an individual work of
art, ever living, ever true. One could follow
this contrast in detail throughout the book;
it is the contrast between the work of an im¬
perfect ear and an unerring mind. When the
external Willoughby is before us we sympathise
with Clara far more than Meredith intended,
for who, on reading any of his dialogues with
Clara—such a speech, for instance, as that
beginning : “ Whenever the little brain is in
doubt, perplexed, undecided which course to
adopt, she will come to me, will she not?
I shall always listen,”—does not find his heart
charged, like Sir Toby’s when observing
Malvolio’s posturings, with opprobrious
expletives? Yet, no sooner is the glass turned
inwards than Willoughby takes on another
stature. He no longer “ has a leg,” but be¬
comes an embodiment of human passions and
disquietudes. As we see him, say, in Chapter
XXIX, restlessly pacing his chamber in first
astonished presentiment that things are

ii2 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

mysteriously going against him, or at the end of
Chapter XXXI suddenly complacent at having
drawn tears from Laetitia, or at the close
of Chapter XXXVII—a wonderful passage—
deliberately creating a beautiful image of the
faded Laetitia to satisfy his vanity, Willoughby
swells to heroic proportions. Without recog¬
nising these proportions we cannot estimate
Meredith’s creation truly, for only by sub¬
mitting ourselves to its element of poetic
greatness can we justly criticise its imper¬
fections.

Clara Middleton is one of that bevy of
enchanting young women in the creation of
whom Meredith expressed his ardent but, from
modern standpoints, moderate feminism. His
mastery in presenting these characters has been
justly praised, and there is no need to enlarge
upon the brilliance, the virginal freshness,
the seductiveness and the generous burning
spirit with which he has endowed Clara. The
effect of her physical beauty, perfectly apparent,
is more striking for the absence of fleshliness :
the agony of her situation is all the sharper for
the rigid exclusion of pathos. Meredith, per¬
haps, was over-cautious in approaching the
regions of sentimentality. How many authors
would have cast away that chance of melting

THE EGOIST

n 3

the heart which Meredith had when he
imagined Clara’s first confession of her un¬
happiness to Vernon Whitford? Willoughby
had commissioned Clara to use all her arts to
persuade Vernon to marry Laetitia. The
conversation took place in the library : it
ended in tears and a headache. Clara had
“ cast aside the silly mission entrusted to her
by Sir Willoughby and wept for herself.”
Clara’s tears and her irritation at Vernon’s
“ logical coolness of expostulation ” are re¬
corded, but the conversation is not. Colonel
de Craye saw Clara as “ a heavenly soul,” with
half a dozen of the tricks of earth ”; but
Meredith did not deign, or did not dare, to
display the natural earthly trick of a girl’s
sobbing in a passion of incoherent sentences.
That is how her conversation with Vernon
must have ended, and it would have given
her another touch of humanity had it not been
left wholly to our imagination. But Meredith
could only bring himself to treat tears more
elaborately, as when Clara repudiates Laetitia’s
hint that she is jealous.

“ ‘ But now,’ said Clara, swimming on the
wave in her bosom, ‘ I tax you with the silliest
suspicion ever entertained by one of your rank.

i

U4 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Lady, you have deemed me capable of one of
the meanest of our vices !—Hold this hand,
Laetitia, my friend, will you? Something is
going on in me.’

“ Laetitia took her hand, and saw and felt
that something was going on.

“ Clara said : ‘You are a woman.’

“ It was her effort to account for something.

“ She swam for a brilliant instant on tears,
and yielded to the overflow.”

That is altogether too much of a good thing,
an instance of the Meredithian excessive, only
to be noted as part of the dross which came out
of his rich crucible.

Nevertheless, though Meredith’s dialogue
always needs a certain amount of translation
to give it a natural effect in ears not tuned to
Meredith’s peculiar pitch, the external pre¬
sentation of Clara is not strained or unnatural.
Her bright and generous spirit shines out
always, especially when she is with Crossjay;
and, at the end of the struggle, in her uncon¬
scious victory over Mrs. Jenkinson and the final
dialogues with Laetitia and Vernon, she rises
to the height of what she is—a beautiful figure
of an English girl, touched with poetry.

But in the internal presentation of Clara,
acutely penetrating though it is, we hear too

THE EGOIST

Ir 5

strongly the accents of Meredith, which drowned
the confused murmurs of a perplexed girl’s
heart. Meredith’s feminism was of the kind
which demanded for women, not so much
liberty of action as liberty of mind and will;
and in his great women heroines it is the
treasures and high qualities of their spirit which
he displays and insists on. In The Egoist,
when he envisages the possibility of a real
fugue on Clara’s part, with de Craye or any
other man, he becomes quite anxious and
apologetic on her behalf; while in supporting
the claims to self-determinatiom of her swift
and vigorous spirit he is a bold and
scornful challenger of repressive, masculine
“ Turkishness.”

His difficulty, as a novelist, however, is
always how to photograph in words the work¬
ings of a woman’s mind. He cannot do it, in
fact : he comprehends, but cannot reproduce,
and has therefore to fall back upon the reason¬
ings and images of his own man’s mind as his
only means of expressing the directly inex¬
pressible. Chapter XXI of The Egoist, en¬
titled “ Clara’s Meditations,” is a good example
of this insufficiency. Dr. Middleton, under the
influence of old port, has gone back on his
promise to take her away, and she is tossing
in sleepless fury at the disappointment, and

n6 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

giving a free rein to her passionate desire to
escape somehow, anyhow, from the toils in
which she is caught. Meredith’s method of
describing her thoughts, half narrative, half
a vicarious introspection, is not happy : we
understand, but the voice of the novelist,
wrestling in rhetoric and metaphor, comes
between us and Clara. At the time when
Clara, alone in her bed, is being simple,
naive, elemental, Meredith, with an air of
having drawn the bed-curtains, yet of peeping
in, now and then, to note characteristic move¬
ments, orates with brilliance and complication
on the hearthrug. A woman in the toils was his
darling theme, and he invariably adorned it
with acutest observations, but not invariably
with dramatic power or vivid characterisation.
He is best, then, when he is frankly moralising,
and his Clara for the moment no more than a
philosophic instance, as here, when the question
whether other men were like Willoughby
shoots through Clara’s mind. Meredith at
once interpolates one of his witty and pene¬
trating commentaries.

“ Maidens are commonly reduced to read
the masters of their destinies by their instincts;
and when these have been edged by over¬
activity, they must hoodwink their maidenli-

THE EGOIST

117

ness to suffer themselves to be read : and then
they must dupe their minds, else men would
soon see they were gifted to discern. Total
ignorance being their pledge of purity to men,
they have to expunge the writing of their
perceptives on the tablets of the brain : they
have to know not when they do know. The
instinct of seeking to know, crossed by the
task of blotting knowledge out, creates that
conflict of the natural with the artificial creature
to which their ultimately-revealed double¬
face, complained of by ever-dissatisfied men,
is owing. Wonder in no degree that they
indulge a craving to be fools, or that many of
them act the character. Jeer at them as little
for not showing growth. You have reared
them to this pitch, and at this pitch they have
partly civilised you. Supposing you to want
it done wholly, you must yield just as many
points in your requisitions as are needed to let
the wits of young women reap their due harvest
and be of good use to their souls. You will
then have a fair battle, a braver, with better
results.”

The whole gist of Meredith’s fight on
women’s behalf is contained in this spirited
outburst, but it is a heavy accompaniment to
the fancies of a young girl’s nuit blanche.

n8 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

He continues immediately, knitting it aptly
enough to the context : “ Clara’s inner eye
traversed Colonel de Craye at a shot.” We
can pardon him much for that, for it is essential
to Meredith’s Clara that, while not realising
the danger of de Craye, she should never for
a moment take a false view of this rattling
lady-killer.

Were these notes not already too long, much
might be said of Laetitia Dale. As a perfectly
finished and never exaggerated character she is,
perhaps, better than any. More than any
other she keeps the Comedy at its high level,
when the overdone pomposities of Willoughby
or the fizzling fireworks of de Craye threaten
to let it down. And no incident is more
dramatic than the change in her view of
Willoughby which began when he “ fluted
exceedingly ” to her at midnight in the draw¬
ing-room—a delicious scene—and culminated
in her remorseless flaying of him in the presence
of his protesting aunts. Meredith did not
always find the just intonation for his delicate
yet spirited perception of true Comedy, but
the character of Laetitia Dale proves that he
could do so on occasion, and then triumphantly.
Also, a complete account of Meredith’s femin¬
ism would need to include some observations
upon Laetitia, for his view of her as a fading

THE EGOIST

119

flower, cheated unfairly of her gatherer, points
to its limitations. There was a remarkable
absence of nambi-pambiness in Meredith’s
idealism, and he would never have hesitated
to offend the extremer champions. When he
pointed out to his own generation that its
attitude to women was an outrage to Nature,
he meant Nature and not an ideological ab¬
straction; and he grieves, rather than exults,
that in the solitude of a Laetitia and a Diana,
Nature was, in some measure, thwarted.
There was a solid robustness at the bottom of
Meredith which kept him from ever “ fluting
exceedingly,” for all his exuberance, or from
posturing, like Sir Willoughby as the “ gaunt-
leted Knight attempting the briny handker¬
chief.” Indeed, it is curious that in Meredith
the airy balloonings of the wit among dullards,
of the Celt prodding Saxons and of the
Radical twitting Tory backwardness are
firmly anchored to the earth by a sheer dead¬
weight of English yeoman common-sense. He
could toss it about, as he tossed his iron
“ beetle ” in his garden, but he could not fly
away with it. And this, no doubt, is one reason
for confidence in the durability of Meredith’s
art : it is grafted upon a stock so sturdy that
only a cataclysm could blow it away.

V

ROXANA

Daniel Defoe, one of the most stupendous
journalists that ever drove a pen, took to
writing novels in his old age. He was nearly
sixty when he produced Robinson Crusoe , and
others followed— The * Journal of a Cavalier,
Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and the rest.
At sixty-four he wrote The Fortunate Mistress, or
the Lady Roxana, first published in 1724, which
is the fictitious autobiography of a beautiful
woman who prospered in evil courses. Mr.
Trent, in the Cambridge History of English
Literature, rightly says that in this story Defoe
“ makes his greatest advance, not a very great
one, after all, toward the construction of a
well-ordered plot ”; but that is a matter of
little consequence. All that element in the
English novels which we call plot, as well as
all that we call sentiment or character-drawing,
originate in the later work of Fielding and
Richardson. They began a new thing, while

Defoe perfected an old one : one may, perhaps,

120

ROXANA

in

\call it the narrative as distinguished from the
\novel. The important and impressive quality
of Defoe’s narratives is that they are works of
genius, a genius of sheer representation. One
could support this contention from almost any
of the great narratives, and I take Roxana as ap¬
proximating most nearly to the complete form
of the novel. Nobody could read this work of
the imagination without being struck by its
amazing freshness. Two hundred years have
given no tinge of dulness to its sheen. Little
indeed so keen and bright is published under
the garish dust-covers of to-day. The air of
antiquity which envelops Fielding, for all his
liveliness, and Richardson, for all his shrewd¬
ness, does not breathe on a single page of
Roxana , which stands undimmed by any
modern comparison, whether it be with Mira-
beau’s Journal d’une Femme de Chambre* with
the dreary Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, or with the
artificial sentiment of Sudermann’s Das Hoke
Lied. Judged by an authentic record, such as
The Memoirs of William Hickey , the measure of
its mere verisimilitude is extraordinary; and
verisimilitude is a poor word in which to sum
up its abundant life. In the craft of fiction its

* See Mr. E. A. Baker’s introduction to Moll Flanders
and Roxana in Routledge’s edition.

122 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

parallel is, rather, to be found in the best
passages of the Arabian Nights or of Boccaccio’s
Tales , though Boccaccio’s elaborate style is a
distraction from which Defoe’s reader does
not suffer. The extent to which his episodes
were inventions of his own or based on other
sources is an inquiry only for drudges, for
Defoe made all his matter indefeasibly his own.
Only a consummate artificer could have written
Roxana , as the feeble continuations by other
hands bears witness; and he was an artificer
with an exquisite knowledge of essentials. To
read this story is to realise again that a great
novel can be written in many ways, and to
understand that before the epoch of Tom Jones
there came into our heritage what Virginia
Woolf, in a flashing comment by the way, has
called one of the few novels really “ written for
grown-up people.”

Without presumptuously seeking to divine all
that presented itself to Mrs. Woolf’s nimble
perception when she wrote those words, we
may be certain, at least, that one idea—a
common-place one—was not present. Any¬
body could perceive that a story of which the
heroine calls herself frequently and plumply
a whore, was not, in the trite and literal sense,
a suitable book for children. It was not to the

ROXANA

1*3

subject but to the author’s use of it that she
was referring. The adventures of Roxana, in
truth, apart from an occasional robustness of
phraseology, are not in the least startling or
revolting to those who have outgrown their first
innocence, for in all her relations with men,
mercenary though they were, she was a cleanly,
decent creature, far too honest in body to
be nasty in mind. Moreover, the ostensible
morals are admirable : Defoe saw to that with
his unscrupulous ingenuity when he imagined
Roxana’s periodical states of self-reproach and
compunction, and impudently pleaded them in
his preface, saying :

“ It is true she met with unexpected success
in all her wicked courses; but even in the
highest elevations of her prosperity she makes
frequent acknowledgements that the pleasure
of her wickedness was not worth the repent¬
ance; and that all the satisfaction she had,
all the joy in the view of her prosperity—no,
nor all the wealth she rolled in, the gaiety of
her appearance, the equipages and the honours
she was attended with, could quiet her mind,
abate the reproaches of her conscience, or
procure her an hour’s sleep when just reflection
kept her waking.

124 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

“ The noble inferences that are drawn from
this one part are worth all the rest of the story,
and abundantly justify, as they are the pro¬
fessed design of, the publication.”

The “ noble inferences,” indeed : a sad
fellow, Defoe ! He would palm off his book
upon the public as a warning to young persons,
and there is said to be evidence that many
young persons were so warned and forsook
their wicked courses before remorse overtook
them. The passages in the story from which
these “ noble inferences ” are to be drawn are,
as a matter of fact, the least valuable, and only
of interest as indicating the direction in which
a fiction-writer of Defoe’s day was constrained
to conciliate popular sentiment. Few writers
can entirely ignore the greater public’s taste,
and Defoe, who, as journalist and pamphleteer,
had played upon it all his life, could never have
been tempted to do so. It is an embarrassing
reflection upon our own day that, where now
he would have been tempted to exploit the
“ sob,” the “ human,” “ the thrill ” and all the
other horrid stuffs or elements of what fiction-
dealers now call a “story,” Defoe had only to
interlard a plain tale with some admirably
expressed passages of moral self-reproach. No

ROXANA

125

doubt his public was more than satisfied, and
failed, as he intended, to observe that, while
artistically quite convincing, Roxana’s heart-
searchings are wholly devoid of any suasory
effect, but show, on the contrary, that periods
of nocturnal remorse will never cause the
abandonment of completely successful daily
practice. The twinges of the soul, as of the
liver, have very transitory effects while things
are going well. So far, then, by the ingenious
importation of a conventional moral, Defoe
indulged the childishness of mind which, in
all of us and in all ages, long outlasts physical
adolescence; but so far only. In all the rest
—in the things he recorded and in those he
omitted, in his pauses and his rapid transitions,
in his portrayal of manners, in his view of
character, in the spare but firm simplicity of
his prose and in the whole imaginative scale
upon which he handles his narrative—he
wrote as for minds which, like his own, had
reached maturity. Such minds would not be
deceived by specious triviality, but would
respond to clean outline, significant detail and
the delight of those deft but unexpected
touches, the secrets of only great artists, which
give life, unobtrusively and inimitably, to the
work of art.

126 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

In bare outline the story of Roxana is simply
a sequence of events, with an incomplete
conclusion : dramatic unity is absent, and
there is neither temperamental development
nor clash of personality. What the heroine is
at the beginning she remains substantially to
the end, and her narrative reflects little of the
external world or the subtle passage of time,
as does, for instance, Mr. Arnold Bennett’s
Old Wives' Tale. The whole interest and
significance is to be found in the brightness
and strength of the picture which, without any
suggestion of background or chiaroscuro, re¬
mains upon the surface of things; and the
whole merit lies in its being extremely well
done, with a surprising inventive power and
with consummate literary skill.

It is the autobiography of a woman, born of
Huguenot parents, who fled with her to England
in 168% wh en she was ten years old. At fifteen
she marries the son of a brewer, a jovial
but incompetent man, who on succeeding his
father runs through his property and leaves her
completely destitute with five children. These
by a stratagem she casts on the protection of
her husband’s relatives and faces the world
alone except for her devoted maid Amy.
Her first lover is the landlord of her house, a

ROXANJ

127

kind-hearted^anS”"wealthy jeweller whose wife
has deserted him. The kifr^ness and affection
which he lavishes upon her irhher destitution,
aided by tie materialistic arguritents of Amy,
persuade her, reluctantly, to safcrjfice her
virtue and become his unofficial wife'.s After
three years of happy life together and the birth
of a son, they take a journey to Paris, where the
jeweller is set upon and murdered by thieves.
Roxana, having with great astuteness secured
possession of a good deal of the jeweller’s
property, then becomes the mistress of a great
nobleman, who treats her for eight years with
princely generosity and delicacy. On the
prince’s conversion to a stricter course of life
the lady, after conveying her great wealth
safely to England by the kind offices of a Dutch
merchant, whose mistress she becomes but
whose hand in marriage she then refuses for the
sake of preserving her personal liberty, sets up
in London as a fashionable beauty.

By a stretch of chronology we are to suppose
that Charles II is still King. Roxana’s house
becomes the rendezvous of a gay court set, and
it is among them that, by dancing in a Turkish
dress, she earns her name. Her first phase in
London ends in a three years’ retirement—with
the king, as we are given to understand : her

128 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

second phase finds her mistress of a rich lord,
from whom after several years she parts. She
now determines, after more than “ six-and-
twenty years of wickedness,” to begin life
anew, to which intent she vanishes from the eye
of fashionable London and lodges with an
amiable Quaker lady near the Minories. At
this lodging two interests absorb her—the
provision for her children, whom she has
traced, without being discovered, and the
resumption of relations with the kind Dutch
merchant. The Dutch merchant is found to be
in London, and, after some ups and downs of
courtship and gallantry, he marries her and
takes the title of baronet to gratify her. The
chief obstacle to her happiness is the unfortunate
insistence of one of her own daughters called
Susan , who, as it turns out, had been employed
by her as a maid during her splendid existence
in Pall Mall. Little by little Susan becomes
convinced that Roxana is her mother, and
leads her a sad dance, for it becomes necessary
to get rid of her or outwit her without allowing
the husband’s suspicions to be aroused. At
length, so far as Defoe himself finished the
story, Amy makes away with Susan, and
Roxana migrates to Holland with her husband,
who further gratifies her with the title of

ROXANA

129

Countess. As Mr. Baker points out, Defoe’s
own work probably ends with the words :

“ Here, after some few years of flourishing and
outwardly happy circumstances, I fell into a
dreadful course of calamities, and Amy also;
the very reverse of our former good days. The
blast of Heaven seemed to follow the injury
done the poor girl by us both, and I was
brought so low again, that my repentance
seemed to be only the consequence of my
misery, as my misery was of my crime.”

Subsequent editions, published after Defoe’s
death, endeavoured to give the details of these
calamities, but they are of no artistic
importance.

Such a story, if it is not to depend for its
effect upon the revelation of the narrator’s
intimate soul or upon the subtle analysis of
sentiment, rrmst dep end upon the manner of its
telling. This is' where Defoe triumphs. As
a pure story-teller he is supreme in English
literature. He wastes no time here on beating
about the bush for preliminary sympathy with
his heroine, but slips on her petticoat and
launches swiftly on his tale. Roxana, having no
illusions about herself, asks for no indulgence
from her reader : being supremely convinced

K

130 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

of her story’s interest, she pours it out in natural,
unstrained language.

“ Being to give my own character, I must be
excused to give it as impartially as possible, and
as if I was speaking of another body; and the
sequel will lead you to judge whether I flatter
myself or no.”

This detachment, which is typical of all
Defoe’s narratives, is not, however, carried to
extremes. Even a plain story of adventure
needs more than a dummy for its central
figure, and Roxana herself is anything but a
dummy.

“ I was (speaking of myself at about fourteen
years of age) tall, and very well made ; sharp as
a hawk in matters of common knowledge;
quick and smart in discourse; apt to be satirical;
full of repartee; and a little too forward in
conversation, or, as we call it in English, bold,
though perfectly modest in my behaviour.
Being French born, I danced, as some say,
naturally, loved it extremely, and sang well
also, and so well that, as you will afterwards
hear, it was afterwards some advantage to me.
With all these things; ,1 wanted neither wit,
beauty, nor money. In this manner I set out

ROXANA

l 3 I

into the world, having all the advantages that
any young woman could desire, to recommend
me to others, and form a prospect of happy
living to myself.”

t)efoe, judged by modern standards, was not a
psychologist, but he drew Roxana’s outlines
with a firm hand. She charms us from the
first with her vivacity, and throughout her
history many exquisite touches fill in the
portrait of an easy-going and lively woman,
the compass of whose cares seldom extended
far beyond the present moment. Her two
failings, as she freely admits, were love of
wealth and vanity, and if these were gratified
she passed her days in easy gaiety, giving fully
as much pleasure as she received. She does
not, in writing, overdo her satirical side, yet
her picture of her first husband emphasises
admirably that trait.

“ He was a jolly, handsome fellow, as any
woman need wish for a companion; tall and
well made; rather a little too large, but not so
as to be ungenteel. . . .

“To be out of all business was his delight,
and he would stand leaning against a post for
half-an-hour together, with a pipe in his
mouth, with all the tranquillity in the world,

132 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

smoking, like Dryden’s countryman, that
whistled as he went, for want of thought, and
this even when his family was, as it were,
starving, that little he had wasting, and that we
were all bleeding to death.”

And later, when she sees this dolt in Paris as
one of the gens d'armes and sets a watcher on his
track, she gives a summary of the observations
which is delightful in its trenchancy :

“ By this management I found an oppor¬
tunity to see what a most insignificant, un¬
thinking life the poor, indolent wretch, who,
by his unactive temper, had at first been my
ruin, now lived; how he only rose in the
morning to go to bed at night, that, saving the
necessary motion of the troops, which he was
obliged to attend, he was a mere motionless
animal, of no consequence in the world; that
he seemed to be one who, though he was
indeed alive, had no manner of business in
life but to stay to be called out of it. He
neither kept any company, minded any sport,
played at any game, or indeed did anything
of moment; but, in short, sauntered about like
one that was not two livres value whether he
was dead or alive; that when he was gone
would leave no remembrance behind him that

ROXANA

133

ever he was here; that, if ever he did anything
in the world to be talked of, it was only to get
five beggars and starve his wife.”

A woman who can express herself in phrases
so clean-cut need never plead for a reader’s
indulgence : she has his ear at the end of her
pen. Roxana holds us so long as she has any¬
thing to tell, whether it be the details of her
destitution when she sat with two friends in her
naked house and Amy came in with “ the
small breast of mutton and two great bunches
of turnips, that she intended to stew for our
dinner”; or the generosity of the jeweller
which began with his refurnishing the house
and paying the butcher eleven shillings and
threepence for a ‘‘ large, very good leg of veal,”
and “ a piece of fore-ribs of roasting beef”; or
the dialogue that ensued on Amy’s remarking
that the gentleman would ask for “ a favour
by-and-by ”; or the brief record of the death
of her child at six weeks old, “ so all that work
was to do over again—that is to say, the
charge, the expense, the travail, etc.” ; or the
clear-headed reckonings of her financial pros¬
perity; or the gallantries of a foreign prince
who is revealed a finished gentleman; or the
storm at sea, or the revelries in London, or the

134 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

charming behaviour of her Quaker landlady
and the tiresome intrusions of Susan. Who,
indeed, could resist a lady so light-heartedly in
love with truth as to write, after mentioning
her retreat with a king and alluding to her
wealth :

“ At the end of what I call my retreat, and
out of which I brought a great deal of money, I
appeared again, but I seemed like an old piece
of plate that had been hoarded up some years,
and comes out tarnished and discoloured; so
I came out blown, and looked like a cast-off
mistress; nor, indeed, was I any better,
though I was not at all impaired in beauty
except I was a little fatter than I was formerly,
and always granting that I was four years
older. However, I preserved the youth of my
temper, was always bright, pleasant in com¬
pany, and agreeable to everybody, or else
everybody flattered me; and in this condition
I came abroad to the world again ” ?

Indeed, Defoe’s Roxana, though she is not
deep, is a wonderfully complete creation, for
he realised, in assuming her personality, a
woman with a mind of extreme complacency,
whose blood, though her life was given to
gallantry, was not hot, who took existence

ROXANA

*35

easily and whose happiness was seldom at the
mercy of her emotions. How good, for instance,
is her account of the temporary penitence with
which the storm at sea afflicted Amy and her¬
self ! She compares her own sullen terror
with Amy’s more vocal self-abandonment to
God’s mercy, and she philosophically con¬
cludes : “ It is true Amy’s repentance wore off
too, as well as mine, but not so soon. How¬
ever, we were both very grave for a time.” And
how calmly and convincingly she lays bare the
vanity which, yielding to a feverish hope of
still marrying the prince, nearly lost her the
Dutch merchant for a second time !

Scarcely less complete is the character of
Amy, “ a cunning wench,”' a creature of
mercurial spirits, of bold speech and all de¬
votion, who prompts her mistress to submit
to the kind jeweller’s addresses by a frank view
of the material question, and who, in her joy at
his kindness to her mistress, “ got up two or
three times in the night and danced about
the room in her shift.” In Amy, who remains
attached to her mistress’s fortunes throughout,
becoming her housekeeper, her stewardess,
her inquiry agent, her almoner, and finally
her indignant and remorseless protector

136 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

against the inconvenient assaults of her own
child, Defoe gives a remarkable picture of a
maid’s fidelity, without any sentimental ex¬
aggerations. One of the most striking passages
in the whole story, in fact, is the anything but
sentimental account of Roxana’s consenting to
Amy’s debauchery by the jeweller, in a spirit
of playfulness. In relating this incident Defoe
keeps purely to the bright surface of things,
but it was an unusually acute piece of observa¬
tion on his part that a woman like Roxana,
having become for the first time a man’s kept
mistress, and partly at the instigation of her
maid, should instinctively wish to get rid of that
maid’s one element of superiority to herself—
namely, that she was still virtuous. Defoe, of
course, having observed the congruity of Amy’s
undoing to his whole conception, did not
violate the proprieties by making Roxana talk
of instincts. To do so would have been entirely
out of her part. Instead, she attributes her
misdeed, as she naturally would, to the loose
gaiety in which she indulged with her lover in
Amy’s presence and to her own laxity of moral
sense in regard to a lover as distinct from a
husband. In spite of her ostensible com¬
punction Roxana rattles off the tale merrily
enough.

ROXANA

137

“ Amy was dressing me one morning, for now
I had two maids, and Amy was my chamber¬
maid. ‘ Dear Madam,’ says Amy^ what !
a’n’t you with child yet? ’ ‘ No, Amy,’ says

I; ‘ nor any sign of it.’

“ ‘ Law, madam ! ’ says Amy, ‘ what have
you been doing ? Why, you have been married
a year and a half. I warrant you master
would have got me with child twice in that
time.’ ‘ It may be so, Amy,’ says I. ‘ Let
him try, can’t you? ’ * No,’ says Amy; ‘ you’ll

forbid it now. Before, I told you he should,
with all my heart; but I won’t now, now he’s
all your own.’ ‘ Oh,’ says I, * Amy, I’ll freely
give you my consent. It will be nothing at all
to me. Nay, I’ll put you to bed to him myself
one night or other, if you are willing.’ ‘ No,
madam, no,’ says Amy, ‘ not now he’s yours.’
‘ Why, you fool you,’ says I, ‘ don’t I tell you
I’ll put you to bed to him myself? ’ ‘ Nay,

nay,’ says Amy, ‘ if you put me to bed to him,
that’s another case; I believe I shall not rise
again very soon.’ ‘ I’ll venture that, Amy,’
says I.”

The deed, which is done that night, is
recounted with a freedom of frank detail, and
the sequel is well studied, for the jeweller is

138 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

extremely annoyed at having been betrayed
into a “ vile action,” while Amy

“ was grievously out of sorts the next morn¬
ing, and cried and took on most vehemently,
that she was ruined and undone, and there
was no pacifying her; she was a whore, a slut,
and she was undone ! undone ! and cried
almost all day.”

Her mistress in vain tries to pacify her by
pointing out that she herself is no better than
Amy, but she is forced to conclude : “ Well,
all did not pacify Amy, but she cried two or
three days about it; but it wore offby degrees.”

This last sentence is one more instance of
the endearing perspicacity which Defoe gave
to Roxana. She knows the world, and she has
no illusions about her own conduct or that of
other people, about her own content in spite
of outraged principle, or about the transitori¬
ness of compunction. It is this which gives
point to her reflections upon her conquest,
through appeals to her vanity, by the foreign
prince, and to her cheating of her conscience
“ with the surprising occasion, that as it was all
irresistible, so it was all lawful; for that Heaven
would not suffer us to be punished for that
which it was not possible for us to avoid,” after

ROXANA

139

the characteristic remark that, in spite of
inclination, she would not go to confession in
Paris since she “ was a Protestant whore*, and
could not act as if I was Popish, upon any
account whatsoever.” It appears in the
charming little passage where she proves to the
prince that she wears no paint upon her cheeks,
in her acute perception that she was “ a stand¬
ing mark of the weakness of great men in their
vice, that value not squandering away immense
wealth upon the most worthless creatures; or,
to sum it up in a word, they raise the value of
the object which they pretend to pitch upon
by their fancy; I say, raise the value of it at
their own expense ”; in the remarkable
passage upon the ease with which great men
can have natural children; in the powerful
eloquence with which she compares the lots
of lawful wife and mistress; in the ingenious
calculation by which she foiled the Dutch
merchant’s intention by giving herself to him;
and in the devastating briefness of her sudden
summaries of the situation, among which the
following is unrivalled : “ Having thus spent
nine months in Holland, refused the best offer
ever woman in my circumstances had, parted
unkindly, and indeed barbarously, with the
best friend and honestest man in the world,

140 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

got all my money in my pocket, and a bastard
in my belly, I took shipping at the Brill in the
packet-boat, and arrived safe at Harwich.”
It is even evident in her periodical fits of self-
reproach, which, though Defoe inserted them
for conventional reasons, are firmly based upon
reality. Thus, in reflecting on her treatment
by the prince and the surprising change in her
fortunes, she says : “I could not but reflect
upon the brutality and blindness of mankind;
that because nature had given me a good skin
and some agreeable features, should suffer
that beauty to be such a bait to appetite as
to do such sordid, unaccountable things to
obtain the possession of it.”

And in describing, later on, her secret
terrors, Defoe in her character describes with
an amazing accuracy just the kind of terrors
that these would have been :

“ And let nobody conclude from the strange
success I met with in all my wicked doings,
and the vast estate which I had raised by it,
that therefore I either was happy or easy. No,
no, there was a dart struck into the liver; there
was a secret hell within, even all the while,
when our joy was at the highest; but more
especially now, after it was all over, and when,

ROXANA

I 4 I

according to all appearance, I was one of the
happiest women upon earth; all this while, I
say, I had such constant terror upon my
mind, as gave me every now and then very
terrible shocks, and which made me expect
something very frightful upon every accident
of life. In a word, it never lightened or
thundered, but I expected the next flash would
penetrate my vitals, and melt the sword (soul)
in this scabbard of flesh; it never blew a storm
of wind, but I expected the fall of some stack
of chimneys, or some part of the house, would
bury me in its ruins ; and so of other things.”

Yet she insists that her repentance, all
the while, was of a “ lower kind,” being
simply aroused by fears of an unaccomplished
vengeance.

In this tale, which it is useless to regard as
a carefully proportioned artistic structure, but
which appears rather as a sparkling and swiftly
running stream, with depths and shallows,
ripples and calm pools, the reader will not
look for artful climaxes or for those cunning
modes in which other writers draw together,
for a moment, all the threads of their narrative.
Defoe’s only intention was to give the illusion
of movement, and in that he supremely sue-

i 4 2 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

ceeds, whether the scene be a revelry of masked
courtiers or a Quaker menage in London city.
Nevertheless, there is one passage in Roxana
where the modernity of Defoe’s outlook rises
to a pinnacle upon which we are compelled
to rest in admiration. This is the great
debate between Roxana and the Dutch mer¬
chant upon the state of marriage at the time
when she has parted from the prince and is
making for England. The merchant had freed
her from the dangerous persecutions of a ras¬
cally Jew in Paris, engineered her escape to
Holland and given her introductions which had
facilitated the transference of her wealth to
England. They meet at Rotterdam, she all
gratitude and he all admiration. It is soon
clear enough to Roxana that he is in love—
an attitude on his part which it was in her
nature to accept very easily. He does not
rush the position, and, to encourage him, she
offers financial recompense for all his trouble :
this, at length, brings him to the point of offer¬
ing not only love but, to her surprise, marriage.
It is her refusal of this offer, and her reasons,
which are so remarkable and which for clear¬
ness of mind, if not for grace of diction, outdo
the famous speeches of Millamant in The Way
of the World.

ROXANA

*43

Roxana’s chief reason for not wishing to
marry is that she is rich, though she loved the
man and he loved her. Finding her inflexible,
but at first without giving any reasons, the
merchant conceives the plan of strengthening
his claims by becoming lover first; and
Roxana, with calm perspicacity, seeing his
intention, relates how she gratified him in this
article while it strengthened her determination
against matrimony.

“ I knew (she says) that, while I was a
mistress, it is customary for the person kept to
receive from them that keep; but, if I should
be a wife, all I had then was given up to the
husband, and I was thenceforth to be under
his authority only; and, as I had money enough
and needed not fear being what they call a
cast-off mistress, so I had no need to give
him twenty thousand pounds to marry me,
which had been buying my lodging too dear
a great deal.”

However, though the merchant’s project,
as Roxana briefly puts it, “ was a bite upon
himself, while he intended it for a bite upon
me,” he persisted, and finally succeeded in
dispelling her fixed idea that he was merely
after her money. He offers not to touch one

144 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

pistole of her property, which places her, as
she acutely observes, in the embarrassing
position of seeming to have been ready enough
to give up her virtue but not so ready to give
up her money. And so, as she amazingly
says, “ upon the whole, I was obliged to give
a new turn to it, and talk upon a kind of
elevated strain, which really was not in my
thoughts, at first, at all.” This “ elevated
strain,” in fact, is an impartial examination
of the matrimonial state, put with a startling
incisiveness. i„ * ■ . ,

i

“ I told him I had, perhaps, different notions
of matrimony from what the received custom
had given us of it; that I thought a woman was
a free agent as well as a man, and was born free,
and, could she manage herself suitably, might
enjoy that liberty to as much purpose as the
men do : that the laws of matrimony were
indeed otherwise, and mankind at this time
acted quite upon other principles, and those
such that a woman gave herself entirely away
from herself, in marriage, and capitulated, only
to be, at best, but an upper servant, and, from
the time she took the man, she was no better
or worse than the servant among the Israelites,
who had his ears bored (that is, nailed to the

ROXANA

*45

door-post), who by that act gave himself up
to be a servant during life; that the very
nature of the marriage contract was, in short,
nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority,
and everything to the man, and the woman
was indeed a mere woman ever after—that
is to say, a slave.”

So far Roxana’s argument is but a statement
of the law as it then stood, and she reinforces
it, on her lover’s replying that where there was
mutual love there could be no bondage, by
an eloquent conjuring up of all the misery to
which a confiding wife was liable—to be
stripped of her clothes, to be turned into the
street and to see her children starve. But
she goes further. She insists that, in the nature
of things, there is an exact equality.

“ I returned, that while a woman was single,
she was masculine in her politic capacity;
that she then had the full command of what
she had, and the full direction of what she did;
that she was a man in her separate capacity,
to all intents and purposes that a man could be
so to himself. ... I added, that, whoever the
woman was that had an estate, and would give
it up to be the slave of a great man, that
woman was a fool, and must be fit for nothing

146 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

but a beggar; that it was my opinion, a
woman was as fit to govern and enjoy her own
estate without a man as a man was without
a woman; and that, if she had a mind to
gratify herself as to sexes, she might entertain
a man as a man does a mistress. . .

Only a creative power on the level of Defoe’s
could have produced this woman, one who,
in cant phrase, had complacently accepted the
position of a man’s plaything and yet proudly
turns on him, with the sword of reason, when, by
all accepted ideas, he is proposing to associate
her with himself by more magnanimous and
honest ties. And the impression of power is
added to in the continuation of the debate,
which is not in the least a tirade, but a close
piece of fencing in which Roxana, by acknow¬
ledging to herself her own partial sophistries,
appears, not as a mere mouthpiece for advanced
views, but a living character. The merchant
assures her that she shall be pilot, and she
routs him at once with “ only so long as you
please.” He pleads the sacredness of matri¬
mony and the scandal of other relations : she
retorts that, not matrimony, but repentance and
reform are the only salves of scandal, and she
continues in a speech of some downrightness to

ROXANA

H7

argue that a woman who marries the man to
whom she has given herself is one who per¬
petuates a bad smell. Yet the extraordinary
merit of the episode throughout is that the
character of the merchant, in the very stage of
his discomfiture, also grows in solidity and
benignity. He is neither ruffled nor con¬
tentious, he pleads warmly for the claims of the
child to come, and finally, with dignified
honesty, refuses to treat any further as mistress
the woman he desired as wife. So that,
finally, for all her triumph and independence,
Roxana has to show herself as, au fond , the
victim of a perverse infatuation. She was
obstinate against matrimony, yet could not
bear to let the man go; and it is the man who,
after all, acts with dignity and decision, by
departing himself after exhausting the possi¬
bilities of tender persuasion and displaying
all the highest qualities of a gentleman, while
Roxana is left with her wealth, her coming child,
her independence and her reflections. The few
pages which contain this passage, which is
astonishing both for constructive power and
force of expression, set the crown upon Roxana
for a work of art. Defoe, we must admit,
though in the'more modern sense he was not a
novelist, wrote at least one great story which

148 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

is all but a novel; and there will not be a few,
perhaps, who, after reading this brilliant
narrative again, will realise the presence of a
quality the restoration of which to nlodern
fiction would be, in the highest measure,
salutary and invigorating.

VI

EMMA

Jane Austen’s novel Emma was in circula-,
tion by the end of 1815 : a Quarterly Reviewer
criticised it in the month which followed that
of Napoleon’s downfall. Napoleon’s last action
was fought near the Belgian village of Waterloo,
and the action of Miss Austen’s all but last
novel is laid in the fictitious village of High¬
bury, sixteen miles from London, nine from
Richmond and within carriage drive of Box
Hill. What a contrast between two villages
which the events of that year have immortal¬
ised ! Waterloo, no doubt, in itself was much
like Highbury—a quiet pastoral village near a
capital, with a chateau or two where lived
the leading families, who kindly patronised the
farmers, the apothecary, the schoolmistress and
their like, while these in turn were looked up
to by faithful domestic servants and obedient
peasants. It would not be surprising to hear
that there was a valetudinarian old gentleman

—he might have been a count—who lived with

149

150 SOME GREAT: ENGLISH NOVELS

a handsome daughter in one of the chateaux,
and that, but for the untimely intrusion of
armed forces, a romance of sentiment not un¬
mixed with comedy would certainly have fol¬
lowed from the appearance at Waterloo of a
neighbour’s agreeable son. vBut the social
annals of Belgian Waterloo were burnt up in
the fierce flame of a fluctuating and critical
battle, the event of which relieved the inhabit¬
ants of English villages from all fear of further
aggression by the French Emperor^) and we
should be almost disgusted to be told—what is
probably true—that life in Waterloo within a
few months of the battle went on very much as
usual, the tradesmen possibly more wealthy,
the farmers possibly poorer, the gossip enriched
with a few more stories, the peasants about to
be enriched with many more grandchildren,
and the young lady at the chateau very little
wiser than she was before. For us English,
at all events, the victory of Wellington and
Bliicher deprived Waterloo of any further right
to a life of its own : in our imaginations we
have petrified that village at its moment of
supreme agitation, and in the sound of that
name, as in the painting upon Keats’s Grecian
vase, moments of intense action are eternally
suspended—the farm of Hougoumont that will

EMMA

i5i

never be taken, the charge of the Old Guard
that will never be thrust home. (And, more than
that; with these three uncouth syllables a long,
violent and exciting chapter of European his¬
tory booms to its end. That boom re-echoed
powerfully in the imaginative literature of the
nineteenth century : Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal,
Victor Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, Thackeray,
Lever, Thomas Hardy, each in his own way
made it resound again. Yet in the contem¬
poraneous chronicle of Highbury there is no
sound of war, not the faintest thud of a far-off
gun, not the least hint of peace disturbed by a
foreign enemy. Mr. Woodhouse, in his per¬
turbation at the robbing of a neighbour’s hen¬
roost, is induced to welcome a sturdy son-in-
law with equanimity, but it occurs to nobody
that young Mr. Churchill was singularly free
from care and occupation while Napoleon’s
armies were raiding the countries of Europe.
Miss Austen was looking in another direction;
her sensitive ears were strained to hear the
conversation of a few individuals who lived
quiet lives. She has petrified Highbury as
effectually as we have petrified Waterloo; cut
off from the incidents of time it lives for ever,
in the delicacy of her comedy and the ironic
simplicity of her ‘ style, with Emma at her

152 SOME GREA 1 ! ENGLISH NOVELS

fancies and Miss Bates at full flow, convulsed
by the news of Mr. Elton’s marriage and
thrilled by the ball at the Crown. ,

Emma is not a story of passion or adventure..
There are those upon whom, for these very
. deficiencies, it can never cast its spell. They
cannot take much interest in life so placidyand
so circumscribed, in complacent minds and
minute events. They want, in reading fiction,
to be swept along by a wild west wind or to be
shown a vaster and more thrilling world of
imagination to balance the dull incomplete¬
ness of their own. Those, on the other hand,
who have once fallen under the spell of Miss
Austen’s art will always find that spell renewed.

Emma , the favourite of some though not of
all, by its peculiar sedateness prompts one to
ask the secret of its perennial fascination/Cer-
tainly the temperament which requires fiction
only to be adventurous or passionate or pro¬
found or ecstatic will not enjoy Emma. Char¬
lotte Bronte, we know, read it “ with interest
and just that degree of admiration which Miss
Austen herself would have thought sensible
and suitable. LAnything like warmth or enthu¬
siasm, anything energetic, poignant, heart¬
felt, is utterly out of place in commending these
works.” j|We understand how Charlotte Bronte

EMMA

*53

felt, and respect her feelings while regretting
her particular insensibility/ We admit the
absence from Emma of all that she remarks—
the absence of the 4 4 stormy sisterhood ” of
passions and of the wildly throbbing heart.
But if we speak of fascination at all, it is to
claim that in judging the works of Jane Austen
warmth and enthusiasm are entirely in place;
as much in place as in discussing Jane Eyre or
Wuthering Heights, if we are happy enough to
have the discernment which can enjoy all three.

44 Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and
rich, with a comfortable home and happy dis¬
position, seemed to unite some of the best
blessings of existence; and had lived nearly
twenty-one years in the world with very little
to distress or vex her.”

' Truly the story which opens thus is a quiet
story of quiet people quietly told. It is the
story of a young lady who, being idle and not a
little vain of her position and her superior
judgment, indulged in fancies which brought
distress to others and some mortification, fol¬
lowed by repentance, to herself. Emma fancies,
first, that she can raise a girl of illegitimate
birth and moderate education to her own level
of refinement; thht Harriet Smith is too good,

154 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

being her chosen companion, for plain Robert
Martin the farmer, and that Mr. Elton, the
young and self-seeking clergyman, is the girl’s
destined husband. Mr. Elton proposes to
Emma instead, to her double annoyance, for
her pride and her insight have both had a fall.
She then fancies herself in love with Frank
Churchill, a handsome, high-spirited young
man, and easily fancies herself out again. She
fancies that another young lady, Jane Fairfax,
is harbouring an unfortunate attachment for a
married man, and that the open-hearted Harriet
Smith can succeed herself as the object of Frank
Churchill’s attention. But she has to learn
that, all this while, Jane Fairfax has been
secretly engaged to Frank Churchill, and, most
disconcerting of all, that Harriet is nourishing a
fancy of her own, that she has won the love of
Emma’s oldest and frankest friend, the middle-
aged Mr. Knightley. Then is Emma’s happi¬
ness wrecked indeed, when “ it darted through
her with the speed of an arrow that Mr.
Knightley must marry no one but herself.”

But she has not long to remain in philosophic
despair, for Mr. Knightley discovers his love to
her, and Harriet pairs off happily with the
rejected farmer. So this small village chronicle
of a year, with its embroidery of pure comedy—

EMMA

*55

the nervousness of Emma’s father which belies
his hospitality, the torrent of Miss Bates’s in¬
consequent chatter and the ill-breeding of
vulgar Mrs. Elton—ends in wedding bells and
a cease from amiable flutterings. It is a story
which minutely draws the life of a small
country district in which there is little move¬
ment but that of animals and little activity but
that of husbandry, and neither in this move¬
ment nor that activity does the narrator take
much interest. H5he deals with a little frag¬
ment of human society in which, for the women
at least, talking, reading, making music and
dancing were the only occupations, in which
old friends called upon each other once a day,
in which to walk half a mile alone was “ un¬
pleasant for a young lady,” and in which a
rich and well-born girl could be undisputed
queen of her neighbourhood. There is a great
deal of gentility here and not a little snobbish¬
ness; tears are allowed, but passionate sobs
are not heard; riddles and charades exercise
minds not troubled at all by the deep mysteries
of human existence; and marriage, as the result
of “ regard,” of “ feeling ” and of “ attach¬
ments,” is eagerly canvassed, while love is
spoken of in a gingerly and sober fashion,\(as if
it had normally the effects of a hot-water Dottle

156 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

rather than those of a volcano. Miss Austen
in her character of narrator speaks of “ the
marriage of Miss Campbell, who by that chance,
that luck which so often defies anticipation in
matrimonial affairs, giving attraction to what is
moderate rather than to what is superior,
engaged the affections of Mr. Dixon, a young
man rich and agreeable, almost as soon as they
were acquainted, and was eligibly and happily
settled,” while Emma, considering her first
agreeable flutter of heart, can reflect : “ Every
consideration of the subject, in short, makes
me thankful that my happiness is not more
deeply involved. I shall do very well again
after a little while, and then it will be a good
thing over, for they say everybody is in love
once in their lives, and I shall have been let
‘off easily.”) This cool and philosophic tone is
rather that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice after she
had emerged from swimming in the pool of her
own tears with all the strange animals.

(Yet, after all, if we consider in parenthesis
this unenthusiastic attitude to the question of
love and marriage, we may have to admit that
Jane Austen has more than her own idiosyn¬
crasy to support her. Young women of to-day
may smile with superiority or shrug with con¬
tempt at Emma’s early conversation with

EMMA

»57

Harriet, in which she accepts quite calmly a
prospect of well-to-do singleness . J

“ I have none of the usual inducements of
women to marry. Were I to fall in love, in¬
deed, it would be a different thing; but I
never have been in love; it is not my way, or
my nature; and I do not think I ever shall.
And, without love, I am sure I should be a fool
to change such a situation as mine. Fortune
I do not want; employment I do not want;
consequence I do not want; I believe few married
women are half as much mistress of their hus¬
band’s house as I am of Hartfield; and never,
never could I expect to be so truly beloved
and important; so always first and always
right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.”

She admits that, if there were any prospect
of becoming a poor and garrulous old maid like
Miss Bates, she would marry to-morrow; but
is sure that she herself would never want occu¬
pation or interests. J

“ If I draw less, I shall read more; if I give
up music, I shall take to carpet-work. And as
for objects of interest, objects for the affections,
which is, in truth, the great point of inferiority,
the want of which is really the great evil to be

158 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

avoided in not marrying, I shall be very well off,
with all the children of a sister I love so much
to care about. There will be enough of them,
in all probability, to supply every sort of sensa¬
tion that declining life can need. There will
be enough for every hope and every fear ; and
though my attachment to none can equal that
of a parent, it suits my ideas of comfort better
than what is warmer and blinder. My nephews
and nieces: I shall often have a niece with
me.

The admirable irony of Miss Austen in thus
exposing, in a dialogue of which every exquisite
stroke tells, the bland assurance of youth, will
hardly escape any reader’s notice; but, making
every allowance for this, I suggest that there is
a remarkable frankness and justice at the bottom
of Emma’s remarks.) We may imagine, in
these days of soul-analysis, of temperaments
exposed and of repressions let loose, when it is
reputed both brave and fashionable to walk
about in psychological nakedness without a
cache-sexe of any kind, that we have a great
advantage over the repressed and amply
breeched and petticoated society of Emma’s day;
but we may not often consider whether we have
frankness of thought , if indeed our absorption

EMMA

159

in our emotions permits us any thought to be
frank about.

Young people of to-day display their glands '
or their libidos and button up their brains;
Emma did the contrary. It was the fashion of
her day, which still seems to present a very
admirable appearance. The result, in this
particular dialogue, is a self-revelation of pecu¬
liar directness and honesty. In spite of her
delusions about her own nature, Emma, fear¬
ing no accusation of selfishness or snobbery or
sour grapes, states her case in a series of brief,
self-evident propositions. She was rich enough,
contented enough and comfortable enough not
to marry. If she were in love it would be different,
it would be different if she were poor. Perfectly
true. Miss Austen may have known little of
the stormier passions in her own person, though
quite capable of observing their effects in
others, but her views upon marriage were well
reflected and sensible, especially in that age.

( If any error might be imputed to her it is
mainly in her tendency to make her young
heroines as perspicacious as she was herself.
Miss Austen saw that the great passion of
love was abnormal, but that marriage was
natural, a state to be entered or rejected just as
properly upon prudential as upon sentimental

i6o SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

considerations. In fact, she made her young
women reveal with more than normal young
women’s directness the logical premisses and
conclusions of a young woman’s mind. It is
only since the nineteenth century that English
thought on these matters has been confused by
sentiment; and the fact that this dialogue of
Emma’s and many others in Miss Austen’s
novels repels the sentimentalist is, in truth, a
criticism of the sentimental attitude. She left
passion on one side because it was not in her
nature; thus she wisely kept her artistic
balance, as may be seen in this very story,
where the mutual passion of Jane Fairfax and
Frank Churchill is sufficiently suggested but
never stressed. But where social fact is in ques¬
tion she is relentless truth itself. In none of her
novels is this more evident than in Emma.) I
cannot think of a single sentence either of de¬
scription or of reflection, nor of one line in the
delightful flow of dialogue, wherein, directly or
by implication, there is a sign of falsity or self-
delusion. 'vMiss Austen’s pen could no more
tell lies than her vision.)

This brief defence, however, of the attitude
towards love and marriage which is reflected
in Emma was a parenthesis. It was to parry the

EMMA

161

ignorant thrust that no story in which the feel¬
ings were so firmly kept in hand could possibly
be praised. This attitude is one of the elements
of quietness in a “ quiet ” novel; and though
the essential and justifiable enthusiasm for Jane
Austen rests neither upon her sober truth nor
upon the quietness of her incident, yet, just as
there is a great merit in preventing feeling from
obscuring fact, so there is a great deal to be
said for the “ quiet ” view of comedy. It is
temperamental, certainly, and not to be assumed
at will; and it does not rise to the height
of Aristophanes and Shakespeare, which is
Titanic. Yet many of us, in whom the sanguine
and choleric humours are not too prominent,
must often feel the charm of withdrawing from
the hive and watching a small corner of its life,
for a moment, in detachment, and complete
receptivity. Some people cannot so watch :
they must moralise, as did Maeterlinck when he
observed bees in a glass hive. Those, who can,
know better than to do anything but smile, nod
or shake their heads. The ordinary life of men
and women, taken as a whole, is not continu¬
ously suffused by great issues or inspired by
overwhelming emotions.

The part of a single individual in the sweep¬
ing movements of humanity is singularly
u

162 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

attenuated, and he flashes to greatness only
at moments. The supreme tragic or comic
writers have to suggest the masses or isolate the
moments; theirs is the highest talent. But
the sensitive observer in direct detachment has
neither to suggest nor to isolate ; he has but to
observe and, if an artist, to describe. Any
comer of life, as much as any ant-heap, will
reward such observation and justify an artist’s
description. If Miss Austen’s corner of life
does not interest you, you must turn away from
it, but your departure does not condemn those
who sit happily by her side. They do not sit
there all day. Other moods will bring them
back again to mix in more exciting circum¬
stance or to be charmed by more forcible
spells than these. Yet, while they are with her,
they will be intently absorbed, for she will show
them in her little chosen perspective the curious
confusion of motive which attends all human
action, the strange illusions that create imagin¬
ary obstacles, the foibles and futilities which
diversify every single human being, the
comedies waiting upon the satisfaction of even
mild desires, the conceit which makes the most
trivial existence important to itself, the absurd
influence of outward circumstance. And if her
ground of observation is narrow, one may

EMMA

163

almost say of it, what she herself says in Emma
of the view of Abbey Mill Farm as seen from
Mr. Knightley’s garden : “It was a sweet
view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English
verdure, English culture, English comfort,
seen under a sun bright without being oppres¬
sive,” though one would have to add English
character to make the catalogue of beauties
complete.

- To observe a corner of life so clearly is no.,
mean achievement, and to describe it so
exquisitely is a great one. This is what has
roused enthusiasm in the hearts of several
generations. Jane Austen’s range is small, but
her art is near perfection. To read a work of
art so beautifully and economically done as
Emma compels joy in the heart; and those who
feel this joy can hardly speak of it without a
happy ring in their voice. Th ere are critics,
of our day who would impose upon literature j
the test of its being a substitute for religion,!
and possibly on this view Jane Austen’s novels
may not be held sufficiently elevating, though
they are most certainly a criticism of life.'
But all the homilies of moralists will never
persuade the admirers of Jane Austen that their
admiration and affection are vainly bestowed.
If they praise or value a novelist’s art at all,

164 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

they must praise and value hers, for it has the
beauty of an unusually acute vision perfectly
expressed as art, with exquisite precision, with
sympathy and with humour. As works of art
her novels are complete, for in them form and
content, each excellent in itself, are beautifully
fusetT into something which is individual,
inimitable and permanent.

One might linger in detail on the many
felicities to be found in Emma, of d escrip tion,
of ch ara cter-drawing and of l angua ge. The
subject of language alone, once it were launched
upon, would be difficult to leave, for here in¬
deed Jane Austen has a magic. For instance,
when Mr. Elton has proposed to Emma in the
brougham, as it returned at a walking pace from
Randalls to Hartfield, and each in their annoy¬
ance had rent to rags the other’s complacency,
she brings the scene of brisk comedy to an end
with the magnificent paragraph :

“ He was too angry to say another word;
her manner too decided to invite supplication :
and in this state of swelling resentment and
mutually deep mortification, they had to con¬
tinue together a few minutes longer, for the
fears of Mr. Woodhouse had confined them to
a foot-pace. If there had not been so much

EMMA

165

anger, there would have been desperate
awkwardness; but their straightforward emo¬
tions left no room for the little zigzags of
embarrassment. Without knowing when the
carriage turned into Vicarage Lane or when
it stopped, they found themselves, all at once,
at the door of his house; and he was out before
another syllable passed. Emma then felt it
indispensable to wish him a good-night. The
compliment was just returned, coldly and
proudly; and, under indescribable irritation
of spirits, she was then conveyed to Hart-
field.”

The force and propriety of this passage are
absolute; nothing more violent or exclamatory
could produce so sure an effect upon the
reader’s mind. With unstrained ease the pic¬
ture is placed there for ever, graven with all
the power of classical eloquence; and it could
be matched a hundred times in this one book.
Again, if one turns from the language to the
characters, what a field there is open for admir¬
ing comment ! Miss Bates has become the v
immortal type of the golden-hearted but in- j
consequent gossiping spinster of a village; j
Kirs, .Elton, with her allusions to Maple Grove, j
her brother-in-law’s seat, and the barouche-

166 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

landau, is almost as famous a name for pert ill-
breeding ; while Mr. Woodhouse, with his
gruel and his timorous abhorrence of novelty,
is one of Miss Austen’s most delicate perform¬
ances, for she never lets us forget that, with all
his tiresome crotchets, he has a kind heart and
true gentleness of breeding. And then how
neatly are Harriet Smith’s vacuity of mind and
John Knightley’s irritability revealed in the
few words that they say ! Like all Miss
Austen’s comic characters they seem to have
been born in her mind with their appropriate
words in their mouths. The character of
Emma has not commended itself to all readers,
but for a reason which is a tribute to her
creator—they feel a personal dislike for the
puffed-up young woman who suffered so sadly
fijdm want of whipping. There could be no
/oetter proof of Emma’s reality; and, in fact,
her character is brilliantly drawn, with a power
of completeness which is unsurpassed in any
of Miss Austen’s creations. Her merits and
her stupidities are unfolded in a most ingenious
fluctuating curve, and its salient points crystal¬
lised in cunning passages of dialogue which
would repay a very searching analysis.)

Analysis, indeed, of the kind on which Mr.

EMMA

167

Percy Lubbock enlarges in his Craft of Fiction
may very profitably be applied to Miss Austen’s
novels, and to none more so than to Emma.
Many admirable writers have expatiated on her'
language and her well-known characters; and
the familiarity of readers may be counted upon
where those things are concerned; but not till
after many readings, if then, is a reader likely
to consider in detail the whole architecture of
the story. The construction of Emma , in point
of fact, is a masterpiece of finished grace in
seven well-balanced movements which vary in
length and in tempo, but follow one another in a
harmonious succession of stresses and relaxa¬
tions which it is most interesting to follow. It
is hardly necessary, I hope, to repudiate any
suggestion that Miss Austen devised the frame¬
work first and then fitted the story to it; that
is not how gifted artists compose masterpieces.
No, the interest of laying the framework bare
is simply to show with what instinctive grace
the creator of Emma proceeded to produce a
work of such admirable proportions. x :

The first movement, which is the longest,
takes in the first seventeen chapters. An intro¬
duction written with brisk incisiveness gives us
Emma and Mr. Woodhouse left alone at Hart-
field on the marriage of Miss Taylor, Emma’s

168 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

governess and friend, a preliminary sketch of
their characters, a brief account of the amiable
Mr. Weston who had married Miss Taylor and
taken her to live half a mile off, a first view
of Mr. Knightley’s good sense and Emma’s
flightiness on the subject of match-making, a
glimpse of Mr. Elton’s position as a “ pretty
young man,” and a slight survey of the limited
society, including the Bateses, which could be
relied upon to make up for the absence of Miss
Taylor in the evenings. Having crammed an
astonishing amount into sixteen pages, Miss
Austen launches into the movement proper
with Mrs. Goddard’s request to introduce Miss
Harriet Smith, and the words : “ Harriet

Smith was the natural daughter of somebody.”
The wings of Emma’s vanity are at once at full
stretch in the pursuit of the first of those fancies
which bring her successively to grief—the
fancy that she can improve at once the mind
and the lot of the pretty but brainless Harriet.
In words that make us blush hotly for her she
covers the excellent farmer Martin with con¬
tempt and begins scheming for the match of
Harriet and Mr. Elton. After a pause in
Chapter V, in which the discussion by Mr.
Knightley and Mrs. Weston of Emma’s faults
and virtues enlarges our knowledge of her

EMMA

169

character, all the comedy of Emma’s deception
of herself, Harriet and the affected clergyman
rapidly proceeds with the episodes of her taking
Harriet’s protrait and of the charade, the blind
assurance of her self-satisfied argument with
Mr. Knightley, and the meeting with Mr. Elton
in Vicarage Lane, which enables Emma to show
a new virtue—an intelligent sympathy in charity
—and a new foible—her assumption of im¬
munity from love and marriage. These lead,
through an interlude of pure amusement
furnished by the arrival of the John Knightleys
at Hartfield and Mr. Woodhouse’s plaintive
reprobations of his other daughter’s rashness
in taking her family to the seaside in the
summer, to the great scene in which this move¬
ment culminates—the dinner-party at the
Westons’. For scenes of this kind Miss Austen
marshals all her characters with a peculiar
vigour of her own; they take light from one
another and contrive by their interactions—
often of dialogue alone—to set up an atmo¬
sphere of excitement proper for enactment of a
cardinal incident. This dinner-party, which
from beginning to end occupies three chapters,
prepares us beautifully between its preparation
and its conclusion—what with Emma’s surprise
at Mr. Elton’s apparently callous behaviour,

170 ' SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Mr. John Knightley’s grumbles, Frank
Churchill’s letter, the excitement of his pro¬
spective arrival, and the fuss and bustle over
the trifling snowstorm—for the triumphant
stroke of Mr. Elton’s declaration to Emma and
their mutual discomfiture in the crawling
carriage. There is nothing left but for the
movement to be rapidly concluded with
Emma’s depressed reflections, her buoyant
recovery and the departure of Mr. Elton for
Bath.

The second movement is less rapid, but
excellently contrived. Emma’s first fancy has
been dissipated in anger and self-reproach. A
second fancy has been shown hovering—her
assumption of a special relation to Frank
Churchill when he shall appear—and a third
fancy is about to be aired. But Emma is first
allowed to reinstate herself somewhat in the
reader’s opinion by her good-humoured defence
of Frank Churchill in conversation with Mr.
Knightley. The older man, from unconscious
jealousy, is harsh and petulant, while Emma,
without disrespect, tries to soften his prejudice
and laugh away his annoyance. Thereupon
Miss Bates comes full on to the scene with her
inimitable conversation and the letters from
her niece Jane Fairfax, the reasons for whose

EMMA

171

appearance at Hartfield encourage the third
of Emma’s fancies—that this reserved young
woman is harbouring an unhappy love for a
married man. A short pause for the purpose
of enlarging on Jane’s past history and Emma’s
reluctance to befriend her leads to the announce¬
ment by Miss Bates of Mr. Elton’s engage¬
ment, Harriet’s perturbation thereat and the
embarrassment of her meeting with the Martins
at Ford’s shop. The last chapter of this move¬
ment makes Emma once again odious for her
part in Harriet’s want of good manners to the
Martins, and introduces Frank Churchill,
handsome, provocative, and eminently ready
to meet Emma half-way in a flirtation.

The third movement is short and sparkling.
It is amusing to note how skilfully Jane Austen
suggests the excitement aroused by Frank
Churchill’s presence among the ladies of High¬
bury by quickening the tempo when he is on
the stage. In this movement Emma and he
execute, one might say, a pas de deux of triumph¬
ant spirits before an admiring company of
Westons and Bateses. There is first the walk
in the village, the examination of the Crown’s
ballroom, the project of a dance, and Frank’s
first discussion of Jane with Emma, in which he
maliciously encourages her fancied reading of

172 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Jane’s heart. The episode of Frank’s visit to
London, ostensibly to get his hair cut, leads to
the dinner-party at the Coles’, where every¬
thing goes con brio to the tune of Jane’s new
piano and conjectures about its donor. In the
bright play of Miss Austen’s irony Emma’s
fatuous self-confidence, though never rendered
mean or contemptible, is here shown in full
blossom. Frank fools her about Jane to the
top of her bent, and by the time the ladies have
reached the drawing-room her state of vanity is
ripe for disaster. She preens herself—in an
exquisite paragraph—on the appearance and
happiness of her protegee—Harriet—and
blandly proceeds in conversation with Mrs.
Weston to lay it down that Mr. Knightley must
never marry; yet all this is but a prelude to
the two succeeding chapters of brilliant comedy
that describe the meeting of Miss Bates with
the company from Hartfield, her soliloquies on
Jane’s piano and the broken rivet in her
mother’s spectacles, the congregation of the
company in the Bates’s sitting-room, Frank’s
facetiousness calculated to mislead Emma and
secretly please Jane, and the exchanges of
Miss Bates out of the window with Mr. Knight¬
ley on his horse. How Miss Austen must have
enjoyed writing this wonderful climax of her

EMMA

173

scherzo ! She closes it with the preparations
for the ball, Mr. Weston’s whisper to his wife :
“ He has asked her, my dear,” and the cadence
of sudden suspense brought about by Frank’s
abrupt departure and his mysterious agita¬
tion on taking leave of Emma. She is left
alone embroidering the theme of her second
fancy into a singularly unimpassioned love-
motive.

The fourth movement of Emma is a pause in
the main action. At its opening Emma is
seen alone, pondering the state of her heart,
and Frank Churchill’s, and at its close she is
again alone, still pondering but with a change.
She has fancied herself into love with Frank
and quickly out of it again; she has fancied
Frank into love with herself, a more passionate
sentiment, but one which would admit of a
gentle cooling with no loss of friendship, and
she had begun to nourish a new and more
dangerous fancy—her fourth—that she may
adroitly bestow on Harriet the place in
Frank’s heart which she herself had so coolly
resigned. Meanwhile Mr. Elton has brought
home his bride, and it is Mrs. Elton who takes
the centre of the stage with the broader comedy
of her vulgarity. This ridiculous character is
given full play, and its exhibition culminates

174 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

delightfully at the dinner-party at Hartfield,
in three chapters, where she patronises Jane,
actually calls Mr. Woodhouse her “ dear old
beau,” and engages in that wonderful conver¬
sational duet with Mr. Weston wherein each
continually interrupts the other’s favourite
theme, his being the merits of his son Frank,
hers the glories of her brother-in-law.

The fifth movement is all action : Frank
Churchill has returned and events are moving
fast to conclusions. Though only six chapters
long, it is the most tremendous, for it repre¬
sents the turning round of the fates upon the
offending Emma. This movement opens im¬
mediately with pomp and trumpets—the ball
at the Crown. Though this is one of Miss
Austen’s masterpieces of description, it is too
well known to be enlarged upon. The dance
music has hardly died away before Harriet
appears fainting upon Frank Churchill’s arm
after her encounter with the gipsies. Emma’s
fourth fancy bursts into insolent growth, and
is encouraged in the comedy of Harriet’s con¬
fession of a new attachment and Emma’s
misunderstanding of her supposed confidence.
Then clouds begin to gather. There is Frank’s
“ blunder ” in alluding to Mr. Perry’s carriage
and Mr. Knightley’s irritation at detecting an

EMMA

I 7 S

understanding between Frank and Jane; there
is the sultriness of the strawberry feast at
Donwell, Jane’s distressed escape and Frank’s
ill-temper; and, at last, the great and famous
finale of the picnic on Box Hill, where Emma
gives herself her last airs, is rude to Miss
Bates, is scolded by Mr. Knightley, and drives
home feeling her first tears running down her
cheeks “ without being at any trouble to check
them, extraordinary as they were.”

The sixth movement, though a little over¬
burdened by the clearing up of the relations
between Jane and Frank, completes the
melancholy march of the furies upon Emma.
Frank’s marriage to Jane, she imagines, can
cause her no personal pain, but only annoy¬
ance at having once more to confess her
stupidity to Harriet. At once and by the hand
of the submissive Harriet she is dealt the full
and final buffet : it is a magnificent effect.
Harriet, the patronised, is confident that Mr.
Knightley has an interesting sentiment for her.
Emma can neither discourage nor disbelieve
this overwhelming confidence. She is abased
to the ground, and is left by the end of Chapter
XLVIII in an attitude of complete dejection,
repenting of all her follies and reflecting on
the grim bleakness of her future. “ Hartfield

17 6 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

must be comparatively deserted, and she left
to cheer her father with the spirits only of
ruined happiness.” The Westons would be
wrapped up in their child, Frank Churchill
would carry away Jane Fairfax, and Mr.
Knightley, their friend of all hours, would be
lost for ever for the sake of the Harriet she had
so unwisely pampered. It had been all her
own work :

“ And the only source whence anything like
consolation or composure could be drawn was
in the resolution of her own better conduct,
and the hope that, however inferior in spirit
and gaiety might be the following and every
future winter of her life to the past, it would
yet find her more rational, more acquainted
with herself, and leave her less to regret when
it were gone.”

To these dull moaning chords succeeds the
last and seventh movement, agitated at first
and calming down to a serene resolution of all
the discords. Its climax comes at its opening.
Almost without preparation, despair is turned
into rapture by Mr. Knightley’s unexpectedly
provoked declaration in the shrubbery. After
this, all is a gradual falling away into repose.
Frank’s long letter, Mr. Knightley’s comments

EMMA

177

on it, Mrs. Elton’s last vulgarities and the
happy decline of Harriet into Robert Martin’s
arms lead to the descent of peace upon Emma
and upon Highbury, and, after a last flash of
fun at the expense of Mr. Woodhouse, the
heroine walks out of church and out of the story
as the happy Mrs. Knightley.

Perhaps, after trying in this manner to hold
for a moment in one’s mind the whole struc¬
ture of this work of art, the clue to Miss Austen’s
perennial fascination is easier to discern. She
has a mastery of vital rhythm, not only in
her sentences, but in the whole fabric of
her creations. With subtle variations, climax
answers climax and repose balances repose.
No two movements are alike, but all are bound
together by a natural affinity, like the move¬
ments of Purcell’s Golden Sonata; and within
their limits all the moods, all the graces and all
the less boisterous humours have their divert¬
ing play and interchange. As in an opera
by Mozart, one bewitching theme succeeds
another; our enjoyment is never strained but
never relaxed. By ingenious yet easy alter¬
nations of key and measure, of piquant solos
and triumphant tutti, our consciousness is held
continuously enthralled, until the last chord
has been struck. We return again, when the

N

178 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

element of surprise is quite worn away, and
again we are subjugated. It is no wonder
that, having once surrendered to this enchant¬
ress, we are always in her power, listening to
such bright and graceful music, so pure in
form, so delicate in texture.

VII

ADAM BEDE

I find it difficult to imagine the reader to
whom Adam Bede could be anything but an
enchantment. There is an obvious excuse for
one who is mystified by George Meredith or
for a Charlotte Bronte’s cold appreciation of
Jane Austen, but this work of George Eliot’s
surely has an appeal to every side of the col¬
lective mindwhich finds any pleasure at all in

matter—to the immediate working o f that
appeal. Humanly speaking, it is a perfect
novel; even, if I may say so, a perfect poputaT~
novel. There Is n othfng~derbgatory in calling
It"* * popular.” forjhatep ithet jha s_onjy taken on

nppMenJLin--the. work pf so many .admittedly
p opular novelists, who fa il in com parison with
standards set up, not by critics, but by the
work of greater novelists.

179

i8o SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Tom Jones is popular; David Copperfield is
popular; and both are great works of art. The
mystery is that so many people, both writers
and readers, can apparently be equally satisfied
by inferior work, with these great examples of
the best before them. The solution, probably,
is that the supply of great art is immeasurably
less than the supply of human enthusiasm.

Adam Bede, at all ev ents, shotys how; all the
elemen ts of a typically p opular nove l can be

Combined in a perfect' wofk- of art"._It is a

story "of "everyday life brought before everyday
men and women. No sbphistication of intel¬
lect or special sharpening of artistic perception
is called upon to follow its development. The
scene, the characters and the incidents are all
familiar : the evocation of the English country¬
side, the portraits of gentlefolk and rustics and
the simple plot itself must arouse in every
mind memories of similar things', heard, seen
or experienced.’ Moreover, this everyday life,
though it“has the simplicity of a bygone century,
is presented as life presents itself at all times
to ordinary eyes—not as a cunningly prepared
situation, not as a series'of detached reflections,
as a flux nf subconscious r ations, but
1 a<t fhat mrinns mixture of comedy and tragedy,
of humour and pathos f love and joy and sorrow

ADAM BEDE

181

into which we step every morning as we leave
our beds. That is one element of popularity j
another is the construction of its plot.

Adam Bede is what publishers call a “ strong ”<•
love story. Adam’s love for Hetty, Hetty’s
seduction by the gentleman, Arthur Donni-
thorne, her piteous wandering in search of her
seducer, her tragic fate, the suspense of her
trial, the eleventh-hour pardon, Arthur’s
remorse and the completely happy union of
Adam to Dinah Morris in the end are things
which command a universal sympathy and
emotion. Not all life is tragic, but this tragedy
is one of the commonest possibilities of our
experience; and one of the charms of imagina¬
tive art is that it gives life in us to our latent
possibilities, at once enriching and unburdening
us. Not all tragedy is so orderly, but the
function of art is this very ordering, so as to
purify our confused emotions and rid them of
the irrelevant. The tragic force and pathos of
Adam Bede, never degenerating into the lachry¬
mose or the sentimental, are undeniable
elements in its perfection. And then, alongside
of tragedy, as it must ever be in England, to
emphasise both its sting and its momentariness,
comes a frank but unstrained humour which is
diffused through the whole book, irradiating

iBz SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

it—chiefly from that focus of humour, the Hall
Farm—from beginning to end.

Life, a familiar setting, love, tragedy, pathos,
humour, these are the fundamentals, but more
is added to complete the structure. First, a
vigorous and supple power of characterisation
which gives us the figures of Adam and Seth,
Mrs. Poyser and old Lisbcth, Dinah and Hetty,
Parson Irwine and Arthur, in such striking
relief that they remain fixed in our memories
as individuals. Secondly, the sensitiveness to
beauty, both physical and moral, which in¬
spired those passages describing the country’s
face transformed by the seasons and the
beautiful scenes of which Dinah is the radiant
centre, so simply yet so eloquently as to charm
even the most earthly soul and to focus all those
vague aspirations to beauty which lurk even
-in commonplace minds. Lastly, there is a
mighty and unconcealed moral conviction
which takes and holds up the whole thing, in
all its beauty and all its tragedy, as an example,
a warning to sinners and an encouragement
to virtue. Moral weakness leads to disaster,
the performance of duty to satisfaction,
thoughtless pleasure-seeking to remorse, humble
virtue to a rich reward—to point out these
truths George Eliot gathers herself up, at

ADAM BEDE

F

Lse

183

telling moments, with an impressive solemnity.
The irreverent may laugh and the careless
may sneer, but it remains a truth that the
depiction of life to an audience is incomplete
without a moral insistence. It may be an
elementary morality, but so far as the art has
been good the morality will be true, for the
moment at least, if not for every generation.

he morality o f Adam- B e d e ? albeit of-a <-prtair>_
'.S everity , is the inevitable and appropriate.
jramelor {jeorge feliot’s picture, giving salience
j Qits,beauties and a fin al unity toT ts diversity.
What, then, can any popular noveT^hmvThatTs
not to be found in Adam Bede, and in what
element of wide appeal can Adam Bede be found
deficient ?

It would be a strange thing, then, if Adam Bede
were no longer popular. Professor Saintsbury,
an admirable judge, has expressed the opinion,
somewhere in his “ Notebooks,” that Thack¬
eray has never l ost his popularity simply
.because he was never popular,. It may be
true that the natures which particularly ap¬
preciate Thackeray’s art are comparatively
rare : not so the natures to which Adam Bede
appeals. Yet, though Adam Bede is a better
novel than many, though not than all, of
Thackeray’s, I have an uneasy feeling that

184 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

in these later days it has lost the popularity
that it possessed and deserved. One cannot
be sure of these things, though booksellers and
publishers may throw some light on them;
but there is a sad irony in the possibility that,
on the score of George Eliot’s secure reputation
and perhaps on the score of Daniel Deronda
too, Adam Bede has taken on the forbidding
appearance of a “ classic ” and ceased to
delight, as it should, the whole of each succeed¬
ing generation. It is a dreadful fate for a
moving and entertaining story to become a
classic, or is it not, perhaps, more dreadful
still that to us English a classic should appear
forbidding ? But so it does, whether “ a
classic ” or “ the classic ” be in question; a nd
nothing appears more forbidding than classic
toaged^r-—

I Adam Bede is far from being a work of classic
I art: its contours, its decorations and, above,
I all, its hum our are most agreeably romantic.
Nevertheless^^rfolTowout a traitrofreflection
—there is a classic element in it, and if anyone
were to call this particular instance of the
classic forbidding, I should not say him nay.
/The tragedy of Hettv is classic, not in its
circumstances, which are simply coi^ f nonplace.

ADAM BEDE

18 S

hut in the f orm of .^.presentation. In pre¬
senting all the other characters and incidents
in the book George Eliot takes the romantic
line : the sturdiness of Adam, the loving
tenderness of Dinah, the humorous arabesques
of Mrs. Poyser and the worldly charity of
Parson Irwine are things not working under
iron conditions, but independent, drawn from
the free consciousness, wayward even. These
characters are given to us simply as individuals,

> with the author’s approbation, indulgence or
sympathy. Hetty, on the other hand, is
presented, not as an individual freely develop¬
ing, but as an example of moral process, like
some unfortunate character of Greek tragedy
involved in the workings of immutable law.
And her creator, fully approving this law of
pains and penalties, the law of Puritan
morality, uses no indulgence or sympathy in
bringing her before us, A gloomy foreboding
and a horror-stricken pity, akin to those of a
typical Greek chorus, take the place of these
emotions. 9

The only r edeeming* quality, which her
creator allows Hetty is great physical beauty,
yet even this indulgence seems to exasperate
her; and here she shows less wisdom than the
Greeks, who, in all the rigidity of their con-

186 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

ception of Nemesis, never looked for the root
of evil in perfection. All perfection demands
reverence, and that human beauty is a form of
perfection the Greeks realised when they
absolved Helen, “ destroyer of ships and
destroyer of cities,” from any moral blame or
divine penalty. That truth has always been
hidden from Puritanism, to which fleshly
beauty appears as a snare of the devil. George
Eliot, with her sensitiven e ss Jojall b eauty an d
Ijerraihg^ could .nolhojaestly

take_JUfi ,&Q_.ahs.Qlut£ an attitude, but her very
uneasiness and exasperation..-, over. Hetty’s
beauty betray her fundamental adhesion. tQJthc
middle-class morality of her day. See her
introduction of Hetty, coquettishly making
butter in Mrs. Poyser’s dairy under the admiring
eyes of Arthur Donnithorne :

“ There are various orders of beauty, causing
men to make fools of themselves in various
styles, from the desperate to the sheepish;
but there is one order of beauty which seems
made to turn the heads not only of men, but
of all intelligent mammals, even of women.
It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small
downy ducks making gentle rippling noises
with their soft bills, or babies just beginning

ADAM BEDE

187

to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief
—a beauty with which you can never be angry,
but that you feel ready to crush for inability
to comprehend the state of mind into which it
throws you. Hetty Sorrel’s was that sort of
beauty.”

Even her similes show George Eliot’s exas¬
peration, for, as she knew well enough, kittens,
ducklings and babies do not attract men. She
is wrestling with the real truth that Hetty was
a beautiful woman , and the truth overcomes her,
since she goes on more frankly to detail Hetty’s
rose-petal cheeks, her large dark eyes, her white
shell-like ears and the curves of her limbs.
“ Hetty’s was a spring-tide beauty; it was the
beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed,
gambolling, circumventing vou with_ a false air
of ijmo.cen.ee*” How typical are those last
four words, and how they reveal the Puritan
spirit ! There is nothing false in young
animals, but there is falsity in the assumption
that innocence means nothing but a disposition
to do what righteous people consider harmless.
George Eliot was a righteous person spoiled
by intense aesthetic sensibility; and when the
aesthetic got the upper hand, as it did when it
was allowed to describe with pagan delight

188 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Hetty posturing before her looking-glass in
petticoat and stays, with the old black lace
scarf round her shoulders, equilibrium had to
be regained by some sarcastic reflections on the
stupidity of supposing that beauty goes with
goodness, and by point edl y contrasting the
spirituality of Dinah ~with the peevish jtnd
shallow self-love oflEe~luvcly %il'lrf ~ ~~

: George Eliot, ot course, ha 3 ”"an awkward
inkling of the truth that even in purely physical
beauty there is something spiritually valuable
and uplifting, and her Puritanism, horrified
at such backsliding, was forced to load the
scales against Hetty and present her as a
nature devoid of any redeeming spirituality
hard, selfish, vain and empty, no better than a
canary-bird. And nothing is a stronger proof
of her Puritanism than that she should have
been driven thus to break a canary-bird upon
the wheel of moral retribution. When she
observes Hetty examining her earrings whie
i dressing for the dinner at the Chase, she harps
! insistently upon Hetty’s want of all warm
feelings.

“Perhaps water-nixies, and such lovely
things without souls, have these httle
holes in their ears by nature, ready t

ADAM BEDE

189

jewels in. And Hetty must be one of them :
it is too painful to think that she is a woman,
with a woman’s destiny before her—a woman
spinning in young ignorance a light web of
folly and vain hopes which may one day close
round her and press upon her, a rancorous
poisoned garment, changing all at once her
fluttering, trivial, butterfly sensations into a
life of deep human anguish.”

And so again, when Hetty has read her lover’s
letter of farewell in a dumb despair described
with masterly precision—for George Eliot
never falsified psychology—we have to be
assured that “ here was a luxurious and vain
nature, not a p assionate one~ Tr '; and later inp
the same chapter, when t he idea of marrying^
A dam — enters Hetty 4 —head^.Geo rge Eliot
exclaims :

“ Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like
Hetty’s, struggling amidst the serious, sad
destinies of a human being are strange. So
are the motions of a little vessel without ballast
tossed about on a stormy sea. How pretty
it looked with its parti-coloured sail in the
sunlight, moored in the quiet bay !

“ ‘ Let that man bear the loss who loosed it
from its moorings.’

190 SOME GREAT-ENGLISH NOVELS

“ But that will not save the vessel—the pretty
thing that might have been a lasting joy.”

And so, when George Eliot comes to relate
^poor Hetty’s desperate journey in search of
Arthur, her despair, her agonised thought of
suicide, the crazed murder of her child, her
trial and condemnation, she does so with
immense tragic power and a horrified pity, but
never with sympathy. She stands aloof till
Adam appears upon the scene, broken with
grief, and for his agony her sympathy im¬
mediately overflows, even to the extent of
letting his emotion adjust the balance of her
own coldness. Through the feelings of Adam
himself and of Dinah Morris we are given a
juster appreciation -of Hetty’s tragedy than by
her direct narrative.

“ Dinah, do you think God will take away
that crying and the place in the wood, now I’ve
told everything? ”

These last words of Hetty’s confession express
a higher humanity, and bring the tears to our
eyes which all t he previous description^ vivid
though i t is, of. .Hettyls- vi /i do lorosa hadTcept
-dry.

Only the acceptance of an iron moral law

ADAM BEDE

191

and a belief-that sm, in-wfaatcvo: < Y+ enuating-
circumstances, is a deadly thing only tn hp
pardoned by God can really justify the tre¬
mendous condemnation which, "throughout
Addin Feck, is laid on Hetty Sorrel. ^ Reviewing
her story as George Eliot tells it, one sees that
Hetty’s vanity, day-dreams and indifference
were no worse than those of many nubile girls
—that she was a lovely little fool carried off her
feet, too ignorant to be wicked, too simple to
deceive. If she had been imagined as some
Undine who gained a human soul at the price
of suffering, there would have been more point
in all the insistence on her insensibility. As it
is, she is given no chance : she is already
doomed in the dairy, to be an awful warning
of beauty’s danger, since beauty encourages
vanity and fleshly leanings which lead down a
steep slope to utter destruction and, short of
repentance, to eternal damnation.

No doubt, in these days, we glorify or senti¬
mentalise too much the urge of sexual impulses.
One can imagine Hetty’s story treated with a
morbid sensuality or a sickly pathos by certain
authors of to-day. Yet our revolt to the other
extreme is not surprising when we read the
fifth book of Adam Bede. Not for a moment is
the author herself revolted by the possibility

192 . SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

that a simple ignorant creature can be con¬
demned to death for having in a frenzy of
despair left the fruit of her unhappy love to
perish in a field, or that, being reprieved, she
may die a wretched convict in a convict
settlemc it. She does not conceive the suffer¬
ings and the agony that she so powerfully
describes as things to be set in the scale against
the outrage of a narrow ethical code, the awful
pomp of legal vengeance and the wrath of God.
Hetty, in her depths is simply—

“ poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded
childish face, and the hard, unloving, despairing
soul looking out of it—with the narrow heart
and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any
sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow
with the more intense bitterness ! My heart
bleeds for her as I see her toiling along <^n her
weary feet, or seated in a cart, with he%eyes
fixed vacantly on the road before her, nevejr
thinking or caring whither it tends, till hunger*
comes and makes her desire that a village may
be near. What will be the end ?—the end of her
objectless wandering, apart from all love,
caring for human beings only through her
pride, clinging to life only as the hunted
wounded brute clings to it ?

ADAM BEDE

193

“ God preserve you and me from being the
beginners of such misery ! ”

For this kind of heart-bleeding there is not
very much to be said : it is only a sort of reflex
sensation like the tingling in the soles of one’s
feet that follows the mental image of falling
down a precipice. Because Hetty, a victim
of man and of circumstance, was devoid of
grace, she was out of the reach of true fellow-
feeling : it was right that she should be a
scapegoat for the warning of “ you and me.”
That last ejaculation is certainly classic in form,
but morally how Puritanic ! A Greek chorus
would have simply prayed to be delivered from
similar misfortune. And it is the moral atti-1
tude, in the long run, not the classic treatment 1
which in Hetty’s part of Adam Bede we now!
find forbidding. It is the reflection of a
particular age, not of human truth. Indeed,
there is more human truth in George Moore’s
Esther Waters, a book which would have out-,
raged George Eliot. ^

This line of thought, however, belongs to the
history of morals rather than to the criticism
°f art. The tre atment of Hetty is no imper¬
fection^ . m A2dm~~Bede, for art must always

reflect the moraT consciousness of its day,
o

194 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

whether directly or by contrast. George Eliot’s
art reflected it directly; indeed, in many ways,
she purified it, purged it of hypocrisy and drew
much beauty from it. Her spirited defence of
easy-going Mr. Irwine is an instance of her
contempt for mere sectarianism; and in page
after page one can pick out passages directed
against a doctrinaire asceticism. What else
are the long discourse in Chapter XVII on
tolerance and human kindliness, or the evoca¬
tion in Chapter LI I of “ Old Leisure ” who
“ never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular
preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor
Resartus ” ? What else her sweet and humorous
description of the Sunday service with its
plain sermon and Joshua Rann’s reading “ like
the lingering vibrations of a fine violoncello ” ?
What else the beautiful celebration in Chapter
XIX of old village worthies of Adam’s type?
What else the accounts ofjunketing at the Chase
and of the Harvest Supper ? What else those
unforgettable surrenderings to delight of the
eye—the immortal pictures of Nature inex¬
haustibly lovely at every change of the seasons ?

“ He saw ... a foreground which was just
as lovely—the level sunlight lying like trans¬
parent gold among the gently-curving stems

ADAM BEDE

*95

of the feathered grass and tall red sorrel, and
the white umbels of the hemlocks lining the
bushy hedgerows. It was that moment in
summer when the sound of the scythe being
whetted makes us cast more lingering looks at
the flower-sprinkled tresses of the meadows.”

Or again :

“ You might have known it was Sunday if
you had only waked up in the farmyard. . . .
The sunshine seemed to call all things to rest
and not to labour; it was asleep itself on the
moss-grown cow-shed; on the group of white
ducks nestling together with their bills tucked
under their wings; on the old black sow
stretched languidly on the straw, while her
largest young one found an excellent spring
bed on her mother’s fat ribs; on Alick, the
shepherd, in his new smock-frock, taking an
uneasy siesta, half-sitting, half-standing on the
granary steps.”

The description of the Hall Farm’s garden,
the evocation of midsummer at the opening
of the third book, or of the “ merry day ” in
August which opens the fourth—one could piece
out a whole anthology of these lovely passages.
The beauty, not only of nature and physical
form, but of all common human life played on

196 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

George Eliot’s heart, and she could not help
expressing it. Over and over again, in her
fond depiction of the Hall Farm and old
Lisbeth’s cottage, of Bartle Massey’s night
school, of the gathering at church, and the
preaching on the Green she bore witness to
“ that other beauty which lies in no secret oP
proportion, but in the secret of deep human
sympathy,” and which inspired the old Dutch
painters, “ who see beauty in commonplace
things, and delight in showing how kindly the
light of heaven falls on them.”

The same delight was certainly George
Eliot’s, so that, in a manner, her attitude to
Hetty is all the more surprising. One can
only observe the fact that, under her moral
code, certain transgressions blotted out the
light of heaven entirely. Yet even to this there
is another side. If the fault of Puritanism
is narrowness, its virtue is strength of character.
The remarkable power of Adam Bede himself
is drawn from the same spiritual sourc e~as
Hetty’s reprobation-^ In Adam we have an
Ironside—no canter, it is true, but a hard,
immensely strong nature, of unflinching
rectitude, set towards duty as immovably as the
compass-needle to the north, more capable of
passion than of tenderness, long-suffering rather

ADAM BEDE

than gentle. George Eliot, while seizing with
wonderful art all his salient points and express¬
ing them in speeches which are masterpieces of
characterisation, makes him always admirable
and always sympathetic. The soft and gentle
Seth—a character also beautiful in its truth—
seems a poor thing beside him. And I think that,
with all reverence to the vivifying art of his
creator, our appreciation of Adam Bede proves
how ineradicably Puritanism, for good and ill,
has become part of the English blood and bone.
An Englishman, in his deepest instinct, feels
with Adam all the time, in his masterfulness,
in his close xo nccntration tr puii fe wund obvious
things, in his exasperation with his fretful
mother, in the hardness of his reasoning where
material facts were concerned and his incurious
acceptance of immaterial tradition, in his
mixture of conscious superiority to his fellows
and ingrained respect for his “ betters,” in his
timidity and obtuseness with women, in his
anger and in his indignant misery. He is
behind Adam’s fist_. striking Arthur- -to—the-
grouncTand in Adam’s annoyance when Hetty
sticks the rose in her hair. Seldom has a man
been so completely and accurately drawn by a
w oman as Ada m Bede hy Geor ge■EIiftt r -arrd-
,he is one of the types upon which, since the

198 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

[Reformation, all Englishmen have been formed,
ut will be a bad day for England if that type, a
Slow fire of hard ashes, needing a strong bellows
|o kindle its brightness, is ever suffered to
Durn out.

Y Even the humour of Adam Bede , which is one
bf its most precious qualities, is not the Shake- "
spearean humour, which surveys the whole world
jx\ a mood of triumphant playfulness. That,
too, has undergone its Puritan transformation.
Mrs. Poyser’s racy speech is exquisite in its
appropriateness, but the mind which it reflects
is restrictive and sententious. Bartle Massey
was right in finding her a sour apple with a
sound core. She is as ready to nip exuberance
with a sharp peck as to check complaint. At
bottom hers is a stony philosophy of work and
resignation in a world where, in her view, it was
sinful to repine at one’s lot and foolish, if not
wrong, to be complacent. What makes her so
delightful is the vivacity of her comment and
the aptness of her similes. Her lines are all
perfect.

“ ‘ Eh, it’s a poor look-out when th’ ould
foulks doesna like the young uns,’ said old
Martin. . . .

“ ‘ Ay, it’s like livin’ in a hen-roost for them

ADAM BEDE

199

as doesn’t like fleas,’ said Mrs. Poyser. ‘ We’ve
all had our turn at bein’ young, I reckon, be’t
good or ill.’ ”

These retorts are what give Mrs. Poyser her
inexhaustible charm and conceal the fact that
as a figure in the drama she is almost wholly
ornamental.

She is static herself, and has no effect on
others; on the other hand, she is invaluable
as a reflection of what is going on. The angle
of Mrs. Poyser’s vision and the tang of her
tongue point every turn of the action up to the
tragic climax, which goes too deep for them.
Nevertheless, she is less interesting and less
complete as a character than old Lisbeth Bede,
who has a dramatic as well as an aesthetic
importance. What a work of art she is, this
old woman, “ clean as a snowdrop,” with
spines of care in her heart and no hard philo¬
sophy to soothe their smart; just an old rustic
woman with her memories, her small but
absorbing cares, her tactless motherliness, and
her acuteness of vision where her sons are con¬
cerned ! Old Lisbeth’s speeches have all the
humour of Mrs. Poyser’s, but there was added
to the framing of them a “ deep, human
sympathy ” which the mistress of the Hall

200 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Farm did not require. No passage in the book
exceeds in delicacy the description of old
Lisbeth sitting worn-out in her disordered
kitchen, after performing her last duties to her
husband’s corpse, of her lamentations to Adam
and her comforting by Dinah, unless it be that
chapter near the close where the old woman
blurts out to Seth and Adam that Dinah loves
Adam, as any woman could tell. There is
'beauty and life in the character of Lisbejth
[ Bede, besides the humour of her canny speech
and peevish heart; and for that I give her pre¬
ference o
Telt little
Dinah’s

ance at her niece’s Methodism, never rose to
the pitch of old Lisbeth’s simple speech when
Dinah offered to spend the night with her.

“ Well, there’s room; I’n got my bed laid
i’ th’ little room o’er the back kitchen, and ye
can lie beside me. I’d be glad to ha’ ye wi’
me to speak to i’ th’ night, for ye’ve got a nice
way o’ talkin’. It puts me i’ mind o’ the
swallows as was under the thack last ’ear, when
they fust begun to sing low an’ soft-like i’ th’
mornin’. Eh, but my old man war fond o*
them birds ! an’ so war Adam, but they’n

ver

goodness, for all her matronly annoy-

ADAM BEDE

201

ne’er corned again this ’ear. Happen they're
dead too.”

The character of Dinah Morris is a creation
of extraordinary beauty. We know that it was
founded upon a memory of a beloved relative,
but the creation, nevertheless, remains George
Eliot’s achievement. Nothing is more re¬
markable than the manner in which the story
reflects that inward ill umin ation which^ such a

_ sheds~upon all its 1

WhenDinah is there an ethereal

surroundings,
ligh^-suffirses everything” and when she is”
absent it is as if a veil had passed over the sun.
From her very first appearance, as she mounts
the cart to preach her unpretentious but
impassioned sermon on the village green, we
are fascinated, like the strang er in the book who

TJ~ r
iicr

_ fo r an- hour

tender s peeches to Seth which tell of her voca¬
tion, heFunassumimg a ccount to M r. Irwine o f
tfie day when the spirit first came on her to
comfort lowly and afflicted hearts, her minis¬
trations to poor mourning Lisbeth, the picture
of her rapt in contemplation at her window
while Hetty was preening herself in the next
room, her beautiful letter to Seth which is like
a gleam of sun before a great storm, and her

202 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

arrival, like a celestial spirit, at the prison to
unlock, not material gates, but the bars of
misery that shut in a human soul—these are
things that shine out of Adam Bede with a
radiance which no change of fashion can dim.

That Dinah was a Methodist is but an out¬
ward circumstance : her particular creed is
intrinsically of no importance. And as foi^
morality, one could hardly say that she had
any. As a character she stands on a level of
goodness far above the rest, and yet as applied
to her pure spirit morality is a word empty of
meaning. Formally the sect to which she
belonged was intensely Puritan, yet, even when
the flaunting earrings of Chad’s Bess moved
her compassion, she stood on a height above
all formal precept. She points the difference
between morality and religion. Tn Dinah
i Morris, with an exq uisite fidelity and servility,
jeorge Eliot has drawn one of those rare a nd
'hnsen snuls \yh n ? in the truest sense, are
religions, and whnse awareness of Cod rhange&
; the r.f mort a l things.

“ Ah, that is a blessed time, isn’t it, Seth,
when the outward light is fading, and the body
is a little wearied with its wori^Ad its labour?
Then the inward light shines ij^Bpghter, and
we have a deeper sense of rest^^^n the Divine

ADAM BEDE

203

strength. I sit on my chair in the dark room
and close my eyes, and it is as if I was out of the
body and could feel no want for ever more.”

These words and all that follow them in
Dinah’s letter to Seth, as well as the picture of
her praying in solitude—

“ She closed her eyes, that she might feel
more intensely the presence of a Love and
Sympathy deeper and more tender than was
breathed from the earth and sky. That was often
Dinah’s mode of praying in solitude. Simply
to close her eyes and to feel herself enclosed
by the Divine Presence; then gradually her
fears, her yearning anxieties for others, melted
away like ice crystals in a warm ocean-”

show that George Eliot realised the kind of
truth which illumin ated Dinah’s heart—t he_
truth which in var ious colours, but with the
same~~5pleuUuurTTiasTcome to all great con¬
templative spirits. And her merit, as an artist.
is that she realised this perfectly in a concrete
form. To have written the two passages just
quoted might possibly have borne witness
to little more than an intellectual appreciation
of the contemplative process, of the mystical
method, in fine; b ut D inah’s actions, her
lovely, gentle w ords, ar id her-ab3olttte~natUral-

204 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

.^jVmS. IS <^x O.lt M£v£A-<-v ^ h i,.

ness, devoid of all demureness or s aintly mie n
o^ ecsta tic pride, could only have been
imagined by one whose creative impulse rested
upon intuitions of a similar deepness. If there
is any flaw in the presentation of Dinah it can
only be that, in the end, she is made to marry
Adam, to become the child-bearing wife of a
hard-working man. Not that the change is
incredible, but that it betokens a partial
darkening of what was light before. George
Eliot was sensible of this when she saw that
Dinah would hesitate and struggle before
yielding to a human inclination. She yielded
because her heart was invaded by a mortal
love, and it was “ but a dividedlifLl’..that skc
Jyed^ydfhftUlLAdam • No one can deny that
it is a descent from glory. We do not find it
easy, having loved Dinah Morris, to imagine
Dinah Bede. Fortunately, it being the privilege
of art to stop where it pleases, we are hardly
required to do so. We only see her for a brief
moment, her two children beside her, welcom¬
ing Adam on his return from seeing Arthur
Donnithorne again; and her last words remain
with us as a promise that, if her light was
dimmed, she was no less lovable :

“ Come in, Adam, and rest; it has jbeen a_
hard day for thee.” ~ '

VIII

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

In the British Museum’s Catalogue the name
of Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon and many
other books, is followed by the descriptive
words “ philosophical writer.” Butler himself
would not, I think, have quarrelled with this
title (and indeed he must have known about
it in his lifetime), though at various moments
in his career he essayed the activities of sheep-
farmer, painter, novelist, musical composer and
poet, not without success. Any study of his
work as a whole would have to conform to
this general directive, since right-thinking, the
aim of philosophy, was certainly Butler’s aim
from first to last; and from this point of view
his novel, The Way of All Flesh, falls into its
place beside Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited,
as one among many expressions of his views
about religious truth, human morality and
the nature and effect of biological evolution in
human beings. The Way of All Flesh, as Mr.

Festingjones has shown in his admirable and

205

206 SOME GREAT: ENGLISH NOVELS

exhaustive Life of Samuel Butler, is also a very
important autobiographical document.

Of Butler the man, however, there is nothing
left to be said. Owing to the marked personal
tinge which he gave to all his writing, and
thanks to his having had an ideal biographer,
anybody who cares to do so can form a toler¬
ably complete image of that strange but strong
character and that charming but difficult
personality. Yet The Way of All Flesh is also
a great novel, which, like all great things, once
they are born, has taken on an independent
life of its own, without ceasing to be all the
other things that it is—a prolongation of
Butler’s terrestrial existence, a biographical
document and an expression of his philosophy.
As a work of imaginative art, taking its place
in the line of really important English novels,
it insists on being observed from an angle at
which Butler’s purely speculative and argu¬
mentative work falls into shadow, and the two
Erewhons —which stand out boldly enough to
the student of moraj satire and philosophical
fiction—become but minor eminences. It is
worth lingering at the point from which Butler’s
great novel and Butler the novelist dominate
the perspective.

In the person of Ernest Pontifex, his hero,

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH

207

Samuel Butler has remarked that a son first
quarrels with his father about nine months
before he is born. With equal truth it might
be said that a work of art quarrels with its
creator from the moment when the first out¬
line or letter of it is set down : imaginative
progeny, no less than physical, insists on setting
up a life of its own. The quarrel between
Butler and The Way of All Flesh was a long
one, for it began in 1872 and continued inter¬
mittently till 1884. Even then Butler intended
to resume the quarrel, though he never actually
found time to revise the book, as he intended :
however, he was able, from excellent motives,
to suppress with a Pontifexian tenacity the
struggle of his offspring for complete independ¬
ence until after his death. It first appeared in
1903, since which date its stature and the signs
of its influence have continuously grown to
a very considerable amplitude. To trace its
influence in English fiction and, through Mr.
Shaw, in English drama would alone occupy a
whole chapter. And it might be amusing to
speculate in what frame of mind Butler,
brought to realise the dramatic possibilities
latent in the disruption of family shackles,
would now contemplate this side of his im¬
mortality; but that is not my intention.

208 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Ernest Pontifex did not add that a son, in
insisting upon a life of his own, also brought
into existence a father. No child, no father, is
a true proposition; besides, upon Butler’s own
principles of morality, motives go for nothing
and results alone count. It is abundantly
clear in the person of Theobald Pontifex, that
a man, as father, is very different from what he
is as son or husband. There need be no reluc¬
tance, therefore, to speak of Butler the novelist.
The Way of All Flesh brought him into exist¬
ence a year after Butler the man became ashes,
fertilising the shrubs of a cemetery. He had
affinities with the author of Erewhon, a delightful
teller of philosophic fantasies, but he was not
the same. He was a bigger man altogether,
who, instead of imagining, upon analogies,
things that were not, looked steadily upon
things as they are and called them by their true
names. What manner of novelist he was
The Way of All Flesh reveals no less completely
than Ernest, Joseph and Charlotte Pontifex
revealed the nature of their father. In par¬
ticular, it reveals that this novelist, whose
creative energy * it exhausted, was through and

* I.e. as novelist, since he wrote no other novel
comparable with this.

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH

209

through an artist,—a guise under which Butler
is, as a rule, but summarily discussed.

Twelve years, or more, ago it might have
seemed unnecessary to insist upon this, since
the artistic crop borne by The Way of All Flesh
matured in the years following the appearance
of its second edition in 1908. Then came the
war—a high explosive far more powerful than
any which Butler commanded. The emanci¬
pations of a century were crowded into five
years. There came, too, the tremendous
interest in psychology, particularly in that of the
unconscious, which I do not suppose that Butler
had in view when he wrote : *

“ How little do we know our thoughts—our
reflex actions indeed, yes; but our reflex
reflections ! Man, forsooth, prides himself on
his consciousness ! We boast that we differ
from the winds and waves and falling stones
and plants, which grow they know not why,
and from the wandering creatures which go up
and down after their prey, as we are pleased
to say without the help of reason. We know
so well what we are doing ourselves and why
we do it, do we not ? I fancy that there is some
truth in the view which is being put forward

* The Way of all Flesh, Chap. V, final paragraph.

2io SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts
and our less conscious actions which mainly
mould our lives and the lives of those that
spring from us.”

Butler, I suggest, was referring to his own
ideas about unconscious memory—a biological,
not psychological, spring of action, and not
anticipating the day when man would pride
himself overmuch on his unconsciousness; and
my belief is borne out by the dialogue which
he supposes the “ dumb Ernest ” to hold at
school with the conscious Ernest about the
difficulties of a growing boy. For the moment,
therefore, owing to rapid social developments
and new orientations of thought, the artistic
influence of Butler seems to be arrested, while
his scientific interest has revived : though this
does not mean that to read The Way of All Flesh
is a less stimulating experience than formerly
or that its truth is diminished. Moreover, on
the publication of Butler’s biography there was
observable a tendency to decry his artistic
reputation on the ground that, in this novel,
much that had been taken to be the work of
creative imagination was, in truth, an accurate
transcription of facts. In particular, it caused
scandal to some critics that the sentimental

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH

211

letter written to her two sons by Christina
Pontifex before the birth of her third child,
and artfully touched up in later years (Chapter
XXV), was an actual document, printed ver¬
batim, which Butler’s mother had written :
as if they had discovered that a cast of a living
hand or foot had been incorporated in some
famous statue. They seemed to hold that
because portions of this novel had an exact
counterpart in the realm of facts they had lost
value, and that a realism so slavish destroyed
all artistic significance.

This view is entirely erroneous, although
upon general grounds and by partial analogies
it can to some extent be justified : much
theory can be built up on the imprudence
of sewing a real trousers-button into an
oil-painting. In this instance, however, the
view must be combated—and not in the
least upon general grounds—for it is precisely
by this line of approach that the real great¬
ness and the occasional defects of The Way
of All Flesh become apparent. Nothing need
be denied and nothing excused : for, in
truth, there is more than one way of construct¬
ing a work of art, while a great work of art,
howsoever constructed, has certain qualities
which stamp it far more indubitably than

2i2 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

greatness of mind or character stamps human
features. Nor need we seek to call in the
sturdiness and strength of the book’s morals to
redress any failure of art, for no bad novel
was ever redeemed by excellent morals.
Butler’s views on belief and human conduct,
sincere, penetrating, original and testing to
those who receive them, stand by themselves
as the general inspiration of his whole life’s
work, but they are not here in question either
as decorations or compensations. The Way of
All Flesh has been called bitter, depressing and
immoral, but against this misreading of it all
that need be said is that it bears out, both in
the person of Overton, its narrator, and Ernest
Pontifex, its hero, what Mr. Festing Jones wrote
of Butler’s own faith:

“ All through his life . . . nothing ever
shook his belief that if a man loves God he
cannot come to much harm. We may not
always know very clearly what is meant by
God, and things may not always work together
for the particular kind of good that we desire;
but there is a ‘ something as yet but darkly
known which makes right right and wrong
wrong,’ and no man can ultimately fail who
obeys the dictates of that voice which we can

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

213

all hear within us if we will but listen. But
he must obey without regard to theological
dogmas or social conventions; he must never
allow mistakes to dishearten him—mistakes
made in good faith will teach him more than
anything else; and he must never grow weary
of taking pains. Then each difficulty will
vanish like a morning mist, and his next step
will be made clear.”

The Way of All Flesh —a picturesque, ominous
but really somewhat unsatisfactory title—was
originally to have been called “ Ernest Ponti-
fex : a Study in Domestic Life ”; and the
rejected title, if less ornamental, would have
been more suitable, for it is a study of the
particular, not of the general. It is the life-
story of Ernest Pontifex, son of an Anglican
clergyman, grandson of a prosperous publisher
and great-grandson of a sturdy yeoman-
carpenter ; and its climax, as Mr. Festing
Jones says, “is the spiritual and physical
emancipation of a human being from the
unnatural restraints imposed upon him by the
stupidity, folly and ignorance of those who had
controlled his early life.” It is necessary to
recall the main outlines of the narrative, which
is supposed to be written down in 1867 (with

214 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

a postscript written in 1882) by a Mr. Overton,
a contemporary of Ernest’s father. Both Ernest
and Overton, Mr. Festing Jones tells us, arc
pieces of self-portraiture and give “ a far better
idea of Butler than could ever be given by
anyone else, except that ... he suppresses
many of his good points.”

At the opening of the book, after a brief
introduction to the sturdy character of the
yeoman Pontifex, the rise of his son, George
Pontifex, to prosperity is described. This
George, a masterful, choleric, hard-headed
man, has five children, all of whom, in the
fashion of the day, he bullies. Theobald, his
dull and downtrodden second son, acquies¬
cently follows the career of parson laid down
for him. He goes to Cambridge, his doubts
about his vocation are effectively nipped by his
father, he becomes Fellow of his college, is
ordained, and, after some hesitation, having
secured a College living, marries the romantic¬
ally religious daughter of another clergyman.
Theobald and Christina Pontifex settle down
comfortably to the pastoral life in the parish
of Battersby, a happy couple—Theodore abso¬
lute master, Christina his adoring helpmate—
with not a single doubt in their heads as to the
creed they serve, the efficacy of their minis-

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH 215

trations, their own goodness or the good fortune
of all those who are so blessed as to be of their
household. The Pontifex mind, in fact, has
come out in Theobald, only to be abated in
the presence of his father.

Ernest, their eldest child, is born in 1835 :
two other children follow him. He suffers
parental tyranny—suppression, overwork and
incessant punishment—from his earliest years,
but not, like his father before him, with a dull
acquiescence. A kind of inarticulate revolt,
even in childhood, stirs inside him and leads
him to bewildered questionings and to practical
judgments of his parents which convince him,
not them, of sin. This sad conviction of
inferiority, which is due to the persistent work¬
ing of his instincts against his persuasions,
pursues him at school, where he is an unsatis¬
factory boy. For the moment, however, while
he is still under Dr. Skinner at Roughborough,
the interest taken in him by his enlightened
Aunt Alethea—a portrait of Butler’s friend
Miss Savage—opens him out, develops his mind
and body, and purges him of some crudities.
Then Alethea dies, leaving £15,000 in Over¬
ton’s hands to accumulate for Ernest till he i£
twenty-eight. The trust is to be secret, for she
insists that the boy shall make his inevitable

zi6 SOME GREAT; ENGLISH NOVELS

mistakes upon the legacy of £2,500 left him
by his grandfather.

Like Theobald, Ernest is sent to Cambridge,
to become, in his turn, a parson. He is happy
at Cambridge and afflicted by no doubts.
Instead, he takes a strong evangelical turn and
accepts a curacy in London. His ferment of
mind, already begun, becomes more intense
owing partly to the influence of his fellow-
curate, one Pryer, an unscrupulous man with
High Church notions, who gets possession
of all Ernest’s legacy and loses it, finally,
in speculation. But Ernest’s malaise is also
due to an inner conviction of increasing
intensity, that he is living a lie. By way
of convincing himself of his own genuineness
he determines to convert the other lodgers in
his mean lodgings off Drury Lane. Instead,
his own eyes are opened to his own ignorance,
and, almost simultaneously, his sexual impulses
overpower him. Having invaded, in his folly,
the room of a perfectly virtuous young milliner,
he is condemned to six months’ hard labour.
In prison, after a brain-illness, his mind clears.
He will see no more of his parents, he will no
longer be a clergyman, no longer a gentle¬
man. He will earn his livelihood as a tailor,
and start becoming a man as a pauper. Over-

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

2x7

ton, watching him, lets him go his own way,
even though this includes marrying a young
woman of undesirable character who had once
been a servant at Battersby. Ernest and Ellen
set up a successful secondhand clothes business,
and two children are born. But Ellen drinks
and drags him down to misery and almost to
ruin. Having learned the last lesson of his
folly, he is saved from the worst of its effects
by getting rid of Ellen. As Overton’s secretary
his self-respect and character are built up again,
and his mind broadened by travel, till he is fit
to assume possession of his weath. We leave
him a man of letters such as Butler was him¬
self, at odds with his own literary generation,
but writing for another, and as firmly fixed upon
his moral and intellectual base as his own creator.

Such is the outline of the book; and to this,
before we estimate its artistic worth, must be
added an account of those parts which were
transcribed from reality. Mr. Festing Jones
says that the portraits of Butler’s father and
mother in Theobald and Christina Pontifex
were “ as accurate as he could make them,”
and that there is very little that Butler remem¬
bered of his own early life which is not repro¬
duced in the novel. Moreover, old George
Pontifex is a secondary portrait of Butler’s

218 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

father, whose behaviour to Butler, when the
latter expressed doubts about his vocation at
Cambridge, is practically photographed in
the account of George Pontifex’ correspond¬
ence with Theobald. We may assume that
Butler’s school and university days were accu¬
rately transcribed, except that there was for
him no kind Aunt Alethea; and we know that
Butler’s own lodgings in Heddon Street were
the close original of Ernest’s lodgings in
Ashpit Place. Mrs. Jupp, Ernest’s Rabelaisian
landlady, was a portrait of a relation’s house¬
keeper. The whole of Ernest’s married life
with Ellen was taken from the experiences of
a friend of Butler’s, though Mr. Festing Jones
does not say how far the details corresponded.
Finally, towards the end of the book, Butler
gives an account, in Ernest’s person, of his own
fortunes as journalist and writer. Multifarious
minor details throughout are taken from notes
made in Butler’s voluminous notebook, but the
most important element in the “ origins ” is
that in which Butler was remembering his
own parents and growth to manhood—a
memory extending over nearly fifty chapters,
as accurately set down as possible, with family
correspondence true in substance though
phraseologically altered.

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH

219

Such is the novel that we have to consider.
Is it merely an embroidered autobiography or
is it primarily a work of artistic imagination?
It is only by reading the book, striving to keep
its whole emotional and structural balance
before our minds and determining where its
main importance lies, that we can answer the
question. If it emerges from this test as little
more than a man’s cruel revenge upon honestly
misguided parents, an unsympathetic and
realistic “ study ” of the knobby crust of
Victorian family life cracking under stresses,
or a polemic against dogmatic religion, then
we may agree that there is nothing left but
to admire the dry lucidity of its style, the extra¬
ordinary vivacity of its portraiture and the
ingenuity of its argument and to pass onward,
classing it with such a work of art in its kind as
Sir Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. Yet to take
such a view is really impossible. It is pre¬
cluded from the first by the design of the book,
which is to represent the struggle for mastery
of his soul and his fate of a man against whom,
biologically, socially and materially, the dice
were weighted far more heavily than they were
against Butler himself. Butler’s own victory
was won, in essentials, when he refused ordina¬
tion and emigrated to New Zealand, whereas

220 SOME GREAT: ENGLISH NOVELS

it is only after Ernest Pontifex was ordained
that the Furies really descended upon him.
The first half of the book—that in which actual
reminiscence preponderates—is then seen to
have been simply a preparation for those swift
and admirable ten chapters in which the
unhappy and exalted young man is deprived
almost simultaneously of his beliefs, his money,
his self-respect and his liberty.

Here, at the first real climax of the book,
at the very point where personal reminiscence
(except for certain accessories) gave out, the
author’s creative imagination takes control of
the story with a masterly ease, shocks us,
surprises us and compels our attention. We
forget the amenities which have gone before,
the minute presentation of life at Battersby
Rectory, the suppressed indignation, the
philosophic humour, even the skill with which
our knowledge of Ernest’s chequered growth
has been built up; we are no longer irritated
and amused alternately by Theobald or Chris¬
tina, and we dwell no more than does Butler
upon that gold-mine of broad comedy, Mrs.
Jupp, the landlady; for Ernest Pontifex fills
the whole picture as the type, though not the
first one, of a man chastened, for his own good,
almost to annihilation. Without any change

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH

221

in the style or heightening of the tone, without
declamation or sobs, Butler’s imagination,
when at last it takes sole control, raises the
figure of Ernest to a poetic grandeur—to a
grandeur, that is, independent of particular
circumstances but immediately and always
impressive, like the progress of a great musical
theme, because its creator’s expression has risen
to the height of his idea.

It is not easy in descriptive words to convey
the effect which is produced at this central
passage of the book by Butler’s imaginative
mastery of his theme, since almost any phrase
or metaphor used to describe this perfectly
unmistakable thing tends to connote some
swelling of language or thickening of orchestra¬
tion. Butler was a humorist; he had deliber¬
ately chosen to narrate this story through the
mind of an elderly man who, like himself, had
long ago measured the follies of mankind and
developed, for the description of them, a plain,
lucid, unembellished but extremely effective
prose style—a smooth but rapid stream con¬
tinually lit by mischievous glints. No waves
roll up in this stream at the moment of Ernest’s
downfall, and the glints of humorous reflection
do not cease; but only incurable sniggerers
could miss, underneath the even, critical

222 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

description of Ernest in prison, the intensity of
Butler’s emotion or the power with which it
is expressed. There is nothing nobler in man
than his capacity for self-regeneration, and no
theme is more absorbing in prose or poetry
than that of a just but oppressed man coming,
as we say, to his own. Butler chose this theme
—the theme of Job and of Odysseus—for an
unpoetical novel of modern life, and yet after
reading the six chapters of Ernest’s captivity *
how can it be said that his art fell short of
its theme ? Step by step we see Ernest, stripped
of everything, recover all that a man needs—
his health, his reason, his mental vision, his
righteous indignation, his independence of will,
the power of renunciation, faith in himself and
belief in a fundamental principle of morality;
and all quietly, decisively and inevitably, not
that the hero may be held up to our admiration
with blowing of trumpets, but that the agony
it may cost for a man to gain his soul might, in
its representation, compel and invigorate the
minds of others. Indeed it was for no idle
sport or gusty swelling of the bosom that Butler
imagined these chapters, or he would not have
followed the noble words in which Ernest’s
rehabilitation and deep faith are summed up
* LXIV-LXIX.

T HE WAY OF ALL FLESH

223

by the painful scene where, on his release,
Ernest renounces his parents in their presence.

“ He had nothing more to lose; money,
friends, character, all were gone for a very long
time if not for ever; but there was something
else also that had taken its flight along with
these. I mean the fear of that which man could
do unto him. Cantabit vacuus. Who could hurt
him more than he had been hurt already ? Let
him but be able to earn his bread, and he knew
of nothing which he dared not venture if it
would make the world a happier place for
those who were young and loveable. Herein
he found so much comfort that he almost
wished he had lost his reputation even more
completely—for he saw that it was like a man’s
life which may be found of them that lose it
and lost of them that would find it. He should
not have had the courage to give up all for
Christ’s sake, but now Christ had mercifully
taken all, and lo ! it seemed as though all were
found” (Chapter LXVIII).

And yet when the supreme wrench came of
tearing himself apart from those parents whose
anxiety, timidity, stupidity, impatience and
imperfect love had ruined, and could yet ruin,
his life, it was as though he had died again.

224 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

“ By this time he was at the prison gate, and
in another moment was at liberty. After he
had got a few steps out he turned his face to
the prison wall, leant against it for support,
and wept as though his heart would break ”
(Chapter LXIX).

It is no falsely heroic figure who, after these
bitter moments, “ pulled himself together and
turned into the labyrinth of small streets
which opened out in front of him.”

This point is the second and greatest climax
of the book. Ernest Pontifex turns to life
anew, strong in the complete mastery of him¬
self. He has still to learn and master the world
about him, and in that also painful process
we subsequently follow him. In the sequel,
which describes his marriage, its disaster and
the upbringing of his children, we are not
always so highly impressed with the inevit¬
ability of Butler’s art, though we can still
recognise his firm hold on his central character
and admire the strength of his narrative.
There are passages, however, when Butler’s
individual experiences and prejudices—about
marriage, for instance—overburden the story,
which he might have lightened in revision.
Yet the old high note of mastery sounds again

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH 225

in those two concluding chapters where Ernest,
now a man of wealth and firmly poised, re¬
visits Battersby as his mother lies dying, and
sees with clear eyes the changes and the perman¬
ences of that scene where he had as a boy seen
dimly and suffered so much. There is a ripe
and serene art here which Butler never excelled.
The behaviour of Theobald and Christina when
they hear of Ernest’s fortune, the attitude of
his brother and sister, the day-dreams and
tremors of the dying woman, romantic to the
last, and Theobald’s impatient stoicism are
represented with an extraordinary clarity, yet
with a certain tenderness that is not excluded
by the old humour. And though mischievous
memory irrepressibly colours the presentation
of the old people—

“ ‘ She has been the comfort and mainstay
of my life for more than thirty years,’ said
Theobald as soon as all was over, ‘ but one
could not wish it prolonged,’ and he buried
his face in his handkerchief to conceal his want
of emotion,”—

yet we leave them, as did Ernest, reconciled
and with a better understanding both of their
strength and their weakness.

At these culminating points in The Way of
Q

226 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

All Flesh, then, precisely where its sweep be¬
comes most compelling and language is most
impressively fused with thought, we see an
artist at work, not directly transcribing from
experience, but using the creative imagination
—and that, above all, is the artist’s function—
to give the equivalent, or more than the equiva¬
lent, of experience. Nothing so high or so
poetic as Ernest’s fall and recovery happened
to Butler himself; but in his imaginative art
Butler the artist recreated in nobler stature, in
purer outline and more significant form, the
essentials, not the particularities, of Butler
the man. Moreover, if this is a true account,
the presence of the creative artist throughout
the book must be accepted, for there is no obvi¬
ous break in the style or the temper where the
satirical historian or the polemical fabulist
might be presumed to have yielded the pen to a
higher influence. It would be ridiculous to
suppose that an artist suddenly supervened
about the fiftieth chapter, when the organic
unity of the whole book is perfectly obvious.
If the artist was present at all he was present
throughout. In fact, the critical sensibility
has no grounds at all for denying his presence
at any stage, and hardly needs the support of
Miss Savage—a woman of exquisite perception

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

227

—who, as we know from Mr. Festing Jones’s
Life, was, throughout the book’s composition,
praising, criticising and encouraging the artist.
That being realised, the earlier and more
directly reminiscent parts of The Way of All
Flesh appear in their true proportions; and
further, we can observe and appraise as a whole
this work of a very gifted but also inexperi¬
enced artist, who, while he could use the most
intimate records of his perceptive mind with
an amazing tact and efficacy, could at other
times overburden his story with detail which
was both otiose and ineffective.

The book has a rhythm of seven beats or
movements. The first of these extends from
the beginning to Theodore’s marriage with
Christina Allaby (Chapter XIII); the second
deals with Battersby Rectory and Ernest’s boy¬
hood up to the death of his aunt Alethea
(Chapter XXXVI); the third takes Ernest
through Cambridge to his ordination (Chap¬
ter L); the fourth is the movement of Ernest’s
disaster and ends with Overton’s typical
meditation on Theobald’s reception of the news:

Theobald acted with a readier and acuter
moral sense than I had given him credit for.

‘ I will have nothing more to do with him,’ he
exclaimed promptly ” (Chapter LXIII); the

228 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

fifth movement is Ernest’s regeneration and
liberation (Chapter LXX); the sixth takes him
through the period of his marriage till Ellen is
disposed of (Chapter LXXVII); and the
seventh, which contains the great return of
Ernest to Battersby, tails off into the post¬
script.

In the first movement Butler is by some
supposed to have lingered too long owing to his
preoccupation with the influence of heredity,
but, as a matter of fact, there is only one super¬
fluous chapter in an otherwise quite admirable
piece of narration. That chapter is the inter¬
polated account of George Pontifex’s foreign
tour, with the author’s satirical remarks about
Mendelssohn in the picture gallery at Florence.
For the rest, the whole movement is rapid,
pointed and delightful in its humour, proving
that Butler’s grasp of his theme was imagina¬
tive from the outset. His material was a theory
of heredity and an actual correspondence with
his father about ordination. He gives plastic
form to the first in his lively sketch of the oldest
Pontifex, of George’s rise to prosperity, of old
Pontifex’s death and George’s “ will-shaking ”
at his children. As for commentary, it would
be a severe critic who could wish away the
elaboration of the remark that George liked his

THE WAT OF ALL FLESH

229

money better than his children because it was
never naughty, or the advice to parents who
wish to live a quiet life. The ordination con¬
troversy only occupies one chapter, and the
fact that Butler did not have to invent it does
not preclude our admiring the artistic skill
with which he uses it. From that chapter
we pass to the comedy of Theobald’s entry into
the Allaby family, the matchmaking of Mrs.
Allaby, Theobald’s courting, his despairing
surrender to the claim of matrimony, and the
triumphant humour of his wedding drive with
Christina to Newmarket. The man who
imagined that swift struggle of temperaments
and the dialogue which resulted in Christina’s
tearful consent to order dinner at the inn
has every right to be called a great novelist.

The second movement opens with that
extremely fine meditation upon service in
Battersby church in the old days, which, did
space allow, might interestingly be compared
with similar passages in Adam Bede and with
Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree.
Butler’s eloquence yields nothing to either :

“ Gone now are the clarinet, the violoncello
and the trombone, wild minstrelsy as of the
doleful creatures in Ezekiel, discordant but

230 SOME GREAT: ENGLISH NOVELS

infinitely pathetic. Gone is that scarebabe
stentor, that bellowing bull of Bashan the
village blacksmith, gone is the melodious
carpenter, gone the brawny shepherd with the
red hair, who roared more lustily than all, until
they came to the words, ‘ Shepherds with your
flocks abiding,’ when modesty covered him with
confusion, and compelled him to be silent, as
though his own health were being drunk. . .

And thereafter the movement falls into two
parts, the first describing Theobald, Christina
and Ernest’s oppressed life, and the second
Ernest’s brief happiness in the sun of his aunt
Alethea’s wise attention. The first of these
parts is minutely autobiographical, and con¬
tains redundancies, but these are not the most
intimate data of memory. In the wonderful
portraits of Theobald and Christina, in the
description of Theobald’s uneasy visitation of
the sick, of the christening dinner, and in Over¬
ton’s reflections on family prayers Butler shows
the same kind of imagination with which he
credited the authoress of the Odyssey —that
“ highest kind of imagination which consists
in wise selection and judicious application of
material derived from life.” We feel the hand
of a great novelist in these masterly pictures,

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

231

and nothing that Mr. Festing Jones tells us of
their origin destroys that feeling. On the other
hand, had we never known that Christina’s letter
was an actual one, it would still appear to us
as unnecessary, for it does nothing to strengthen
our knowledge of Christina; and the same
thing may be said of certain other memories—
Ernest’s determination to have a natural child,
Ernest’s remarks on clergymen as fathers, and
the elaborate portrait of Dr. Kennedy under
the name of Dr. Skinner. Here, as elsewhere
in the book, Butler’s inexperience resulted in
excess. But how admirable and lifelike, and
how moving, is the picture of Ernest’s school¬
days ! Dickens himself could have given no
more living portrait of an unhappy child, nor
could he have imagined anyone more wise and
delightful than Alethea Pontifex. The inven¬
tion of Alethea was an imaginative stroke of
great excellence, for it gives, at a critical period
in Ernest’s life, a friendly but unprejudiced
view of his virtues and follies, out of which all
the rest of the book develops.

The third movement is lively throughout.
The whole incident of Ellen’s dismissal and
Ernest’s giving her his watch, delightfully
told, is followed by Theobald’s comic inquisi¬
tion into the morality of Roughborough, the

232 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

admirable summary of Ernest’s happiness at
Cambridge, the episode of the Simeonites and
the impressive sermon of the Rev. Gideon
Hawke. Butler wrote most eloquent sermons
for other people, as readers of Erewhon Re¬
visited will remember. Then follow the two
great culminating movements of Ernest’s fall
and recovery, of which enough has already been
said. I can only insist again that they set
irremovably the stamp of great art upon The
Way of All Flesh. After these the marriage
movement, for all its sober pointedness, is
something of a relaxation; and it is perhaps
to be regretted that Butler failed to use here
the artistic possibilities of Mrs. Jupp, the aban¬
doned old landlady of Ernest’s London lodg¬
ings. Here was a figure of the stature and
comic force of a Sairey Gamp, yet Butler,
though obviously delighted with her racy
speech and her worldly wisdom, only uses her
as an accessory. More of Mrs. Jupp and less
of Ernest’s mental development would have
immeasurably improved the two final move¬
ments, the last of which in particular is too
highly charged with Butler’s interest in his
own figure as a writer. Chapters LXXVIII to
LXXXI and LXXXIII to the end needed
severely telescoping, if they were not to be, as

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

233

they now irrevocably are, a somewhat tedious
setting for those two great chapters of the
return to Battersby, where Butler’s creative
imagination soars up again to its full height.

Surveyed as a whole, unless the vision be
obscured by unalterable prejudice or blurred
by the fog of outraged convictions, how impos¬
ing is this work, and how unimportant its
blemishes compared with the great rhythm of
its design and the vital vigour of its detail ! No
wonder that it inspired Mr. Bernard Shaw,
a writer of far narrower imagination than
Samuel Butler. Place it beside David Copper-
field, Martin Chuzzlewit, or Pendennis, and it
neither wilts nor looks wan, though it stands
to these other accounts of a young man’s
progress in the strongest possible contrast.
Butler had neither Dickens’ dramatic force nor
Thackeray’s power of cumulatively marshalling
detail, but in delicacy of perception, in the
vivacity of his episodes, in the skilful diversifica¬
tion of narrative accent, as well as in his quite
original humour, he holds his own with ease.
Moreover, if truth be in question, there are few
British novelists that might not shrink from a
test by Butler, who threw a pale but searching
beam upon the organic structure of social life
which makes the lights of Dickens’ enthusiasm

234 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

and of Thackeray’s regretful disillusionment
seem flickering indeed; and if it be emotion,
there was no indignation fiercer than that
which smouldered under the studied calmness
of Butler’s eloquence. God denied him the
poet’s power to handle with ease the symbols
of beauty, but the beauty that he felt and the
absence of it that he hated are evident enough,
though he had to be content that Handel’s
music expressed his own dumb poetry. Like
Ernest, often bewildered, often injudicious, a
man of impulse rather than settled plan, a
critic rather than a lover of humanity, there
was nothing “ which he dared not venture if
it would make the world a happier place for
those who were young and lovable.” The
Way of All Flesh , little as he realised it, was the
greatest of his ventures, and the world is already
the better for its influence.

IX

THE NOVELS

OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN

Benvenuto Cellini, the silversmith, wrote
an entertaining autobiography, but William de
Morgan is the only instance of a potter turning
novelist. Good pottery is expensive, while
entertaining novels are cheap : this economic
fact made a great difference to William de
Morgan, who strove for nearly thirty years
to make an unbusinesslike pottery pay and,
when financial failure broke the pottery, won
popular fame and a decent income by exploit¬
ing a by-product of his imagination. By one
of life’s little ironies, which might have prompted
Mr. Hardy’s muse, the primary artist in
William de Morgan was ignored by all but a
few, while the secondary artist was lauded with
effusive eulogy. He regarded this singular
fate, so far as we know, without bitterness or
irony, accepting the early neglect with cheerful
fortitude and the later admiration with grateful
simplicity. Fortune took an ancient shuttle-

235

236 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

cock, decked it with new feathers and, for once,
drove it high up into the air with the battledore
that had so often struck it groundwards. The
child within us applauds her action, for belated
prosperity after years of disappointment is
approved by our romantic sense; but should
we not rather blame her in the first instance
for limiting the output of a supreme craftsman ?
Even as it was, William de Morgan’s inventive
skill, industrious research, and subtle sense of
plastic beauty rendered magnificent service to
the potter’s art in England; but, given success
instead of failure, his example and the output
of his factories might have made a world-
famous epoch in ceramics. We should not then
have had Joseph Vance, it is true; but one is led
to wonder, gazing at his pottery in the Museum,
how many of such novels should go to a pot,
bowl or tile of so consummate workmanship.
In two of his novels he poured humorous con¬
tempt upon his own false start as a painter : the
falseness of the start is evident, but he soon found
his way into a track that was pre-eminently
his own. From the works that he produced
and from his letters published in Mrs. Stir¬
ling’s memoir * it is obvious that upon the art

* William de Morgan and his Wife , by A. M. W.
Stirling : Thornton Butterworth.

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 237

of ceramics he lavished the whole of his enter¬
prising inventiveness, his natural energy, and
that mysterious inborn sense of texture, colour
and form which not even the aptest pupil could
copy. Those who think of him only as a
lovable elderly gentleman who wrote charm¬
ing, leisurely, discursive novels forget that, as
a young and impassioned potter, he once burnt
as fiercely as one of his own furnaces.

It is by no means to disparage the novelist
that the potter is recalled, but rather to give
the whole man his due. William de Morgan’s
novels are but a part of him and, with all their
peculiar charm, can hardly rank among master¬
pieces of fiction as his pots among masterpieces
of pottery. It is enough to observe his different
attitudes towards his two branches of creation
to see why; and there is ample material in
Mrs. Stirling’s interesting, albeit fragmentary
and uncritical memoir, for conducting this
observation. On the one hand, we find absorp¬
tion, determination, passion, an unending
struggle to fathom the secrets of old lustres and
glazes, and a high aim perpetually in view.
As a potter he knew exactly what he wanted,
on the plastic as well as the technical side. In
his ceramic work, particularly where form and
colour were concerned, he had that last touch

238 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

of superiority which puts a gulf between the
best and the next best. He poured an inex¬
haustible fertility of imagination into this life’s
work of his, testing feverishly every possible
material and abounding in mechanical inven¬
tions. His hold on his chosen art of ceramics
was, in fact, the complete lordly hold of a
master which no misfortune can shake. On the
other hand, when we turn to the novels, we
find amusement, delight, a wonderfully gifted
dilettantism, the outpouring of a capacious
memory through the channel of a sensitive yet
humorous personality; but the passionate
absorption and the lordly hold were not there.
On his own confession, he approached litera¬
ture not as an art but as a diversion. There
were no secrets that he pined to fathom, and
he sought no far-away ideal of beauty, even
though, as a writer, he possessed some secrets
which many have hunted in vain, and achieved
beauty at times almost without knowing it.
In one art he was an inspired leader; in the
other he was a singular phenomenon two
generations behind a literary age in which he
took no interest. His reading had stopped
short in youth with Dickens, and at the age
of sixty-five he went on writing where he had
left off reading. Luckily for him, he had a

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 239

natural genius for spinning a long yarn, and
a remarkable power of observation. In any
age and with any method these gifts will tell.
Also, his literary powers were fresh when his
memory was old and his experience mature.
In this unique novelist vieillesse savait et jeunesse
pouvait.

The .story of William de Morgan’s second
career is too well known to need more than
brief reference. Some time in 1901 he had,
for his own amusement, written two chapters
of a novel, just to see what he could do. “ I
have always loved grubby little boys,” he
explained later, “ and I thought I should like
to write the story of a grubby little boy.” The
result did not impress its author. It was
nearly burnt, and afterwards consigned to the
waste-paper basket, whence Mrs. de Morgan
rescued it. The wise wife bided her oppor¬
tunity. The South African War, with its
financial depression finished off the dying
factory at Fulham, and the potter was de¬
pressed and idle. Influenza caught him and
laid him on his back. Here was the oppor¬
tunity. One day Mrs. de Morgan laid the
rescued manuscript and a pencil by his bedside
with the brief remark : “I think something
might be made of this.” When she returned,

240 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

the washing book and every scrap of paper
within reach were already filled with a con¬
tinuation of the story. Thus Joseph Vance was
bom. The book was finished in 1904 and pub¬
lished in 1906, when its author was sixty-seven.
Its immediate success gave him an occupation
which lasted him for the rest of his days. For
another eleven years he quarried assiduously
with his pen the rich placer-reef of his literary
imagination. Seven more stories had been
published and there were two lying unfinished
when in January 1917 he died, tragically
infected with trench fever.

The fragments of The Old Man's Youth show
that increasing age and a marvellous fertility
had in no way exhausted the charm with which
he exploited his peculiar vein of reminiscence
or the power of his literary personality to compel
the affection of his readers. Yet there is nothing
essential in his later novels that was not already
in his first and finest, Joseph Vance. He himself
knew it was his best, and inclined to believe
that this was true of all first novels.

“ Later works (he remarked once) may be
an advance in construction, as they will cer¬
tainly be more in conformity with accepted
standards; but something will have gone from
them, never to be regained, of the freshness,

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 241

the artlessness of expression which may be akin
to genius.”

This remark was true of his own work, but
it curiously illustrates his own attitude towards
his compositions. As a writer he found himself
affected by contemporary criticism and influ¬
enced by contemporary standards; he could
regret a certain freshness lost, having gained no
increased mastery of expression to compensate
for it. But this is not the attitude of the con¬
vinced artist, certainly not of the great potter,
who paid small attention to criticism and
proudly made his own standards, raising them
higher and higher as he progressed from the
first happy spontaneity to the conscious cer¬
tainty of mature artistic expression. At the
same time, if his novels and his attitude to them
have not the quality of his pottery and his
attitude towards it, it is worth while here to
make the point that, in certain directions, his
literary work gavj an outlet to natural springs
in his personality which had hardly entered the
main channel of his ceramic art. It might
possibly be maintained that William de Morgan
was, before all things, an inventor : the process
was perhaps more to him than the artistic
conception. That type of inventiveness had
ample scope in solving the technical problems

242 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

of firing, staining and glazing clay. But he had
also that other type of inventiveness which is
purely imaginative, and, as I at least feel, this
comes out better in the elaboration of his com¬
plicated plots than in the conventional and
rather archaistic designs which, under the
strong influence of William Morris, he made
for his pottery. At all events, in his novels
this inventiveness could take long and sustained
flights which resulted in those extraordinary,
almost grotesque, complications which make
the succinct statement of his plots a sheer
impossibility. Here, too, comes in the element
of supernaturalism which was very strongly in
his nature, as we learn from Mrs. Stirling. His
mother, we gather, was a convinced spiritual¬
ist, and his distinguished father, Augustus
de Morgan, the mathematician, believed firmly
in the possibility, even the probability, of
further existences after mortal life. His father’s
beliefs, which were the basis of the kindly
immortalism of Dr. Thorpe in Joseph Vance, and
his mother’s spiritualistic leanings entered into
their son, and they found an issue in that fond¬
ness for supernatural manifestations which is
shown in his novels. Over ghosts and appari¬
tions, such as those who appeared to Alice
in her basement, he took tremendous pains,

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 243

explaining their history with disproportionate
elaboration, not for the sake of mere melo¬
drama, but out of a genuine interest in that
mysterious “ other side ” of which he was so
hopeful. The other natural spring for which
the novels furnished him an outlet was his wag¬
gish, philosophical humour. It is strange that
the body of friends, of whom Burne-Jones was
the centre, had such high spirits in daily inter¬
course and such melancholy in art. Burne-
Jones’s humorous letters are exquisite; Rossetti
and Morris were anything but mopers, and
de Morgan never lost the opportunity for a joke
or a pun. When one looks at the dreamy faces
and languorous attitudes, the sad patterns, the
joyless greens and yellows, the heavy purples
which distinguish this school of art, one wonders
where they put all their high spirits when they
sat down to paint. Not till he began to write
novels did de Morgan find room for humour in
his art, which is on the literary side anything
but Morrisian. The Blessed Damozel might
have walked upon his tiles and King Cophetua
have poured a drink for the beggar maid out
of his pots, but either would have been out¬
raged had they been asked to include the
reading of Joseph Vance among their pallid
diversions. In the novels there are places

244 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

where the mood of facetious commentary
becomes a little overpowering, but it is a
pleasing, comfortable humour that must appeal
to all but prigs. One feels lhat one is in
company with a jovial man who, all his life,
has chuckled secretly at the comedy of life’s
little things, and that he cannot keep the
joke to himself any longer.

William de Morgan’s novels, indeed, are the
summary of “ all his life.” The original idea
of Joseph Vance was a story supposed to be told
to the narrator by an old man dying in a work-
house. In the event Joseph Vance was pre¬
sented as an elderly gentleman who, after
twenty years of business life in South America,
sat down in a lonely Bloomsbury lodging to
recall a dead past, writing the memoir—which
is the novel—“ as an experiment to see how
much I could recollect if I once began to try.”
The author’s own attitude was not quite so
simple, but, in the main, it is the mood of
felicitous reminiscence which gives his novels
their individual charm. He is peculiarly him¬
self when he is looking backwards, as he is
pre-eminently doing in Joseph Vance , Alice-for-
Short, When Ghost Meets Ghost , and The Old
Man’s Touth. It is impossible to resist the
fascination of being taken so delightfully by

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 245

the hand and led back to scenes remembered
with so intimate a blend of tenderness and
humour. If this element were abstracted from
his novels, a great deal of their wide appeal
would go with it. And the secret of his appeal
is that he loved the past and dwelt upon it with
a lingering joy that could not refrain from
recording the minutest detail of a happier age
when he and all his world were young.

“ For these were the days of crinolines; of
hair in cabbage-nets, packed round rubber
inflations; of what may be called proto¬
croquet, with hoops so large that no one ever
failed to get through, except you and me; the
days when ‘ Ah che la morte ’ was the last new
tune, and Landseer and Mulready the last
words in art. They were the days when there
had been but one Great Exhibition—think of
it !—and the British Fleet could still get under
canvas. We, being an old fogey, would so
much like to go back to those days—to think
of daguerreotypes as a stupendous triumph of
science, balloons as indigenous to Cremorne,
and table-turning as a nine-days wonder;
in a word, to feel our biceps with satisfaction
in an epoch when wheels went slow, folks
played tunes and nobody had appendicitis.”

246 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

To the present, with its motor-cars and Im¬
pressionism, its noise and bustle, he was ironic¬
ally resigned, but he could neither praise nor
wholly understand it. It is hardly surprising
that the scenes which he laid in it, those of
Somehow Good and It Can Never Happen Again,
were not realised with complete success. The
saving graces of both these stories, in fact, are
due to the surreptitious entry of the past. In
the first the evocation of an unspoiled South
Coast watering-place and in the second the
description of Tallack Street—one of London’s
old facial sores unhealed by time—gave him his
opportunities for going back topographically;
while, on the human side, the characterisation,
in general, is hardly distinguishable from that
of his more distant retrospects. Sally, Pro¬
fessor Sales-Wilson, and the young doctor’s
odious old mother in Somehow Good belong to
the Victorian age with Peggy Heath and Dr.
Thorpe, whilejim Coupland, Lizarann and Aunt
Steptoe in It Can Never Happen Again are con¬
temporaries in spirit of little Joe Vance and of
those denizens of Sapp’s Court who chiefly
enliven the multitudinous pages of When Ghost
Meets Ghost. His comparative failures show
that where a rich sense of the eighteen-fifties
could not enter in by chink or cranny his hand
became weak and his artistic sense confused.

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 247

His romance of the Stuart period, An Affair
of Dishonour , is stiff and theatrical, and much of
It Can Never Happen Again is awkward and
unnatural. The uncertainty of his creative
imagination, when not supported by experience,
is exemplified particularly in the latter novel,
the politer portions of which deal with the
unfortunate love affairs of Alfred Challis,
novelist, whose second wife, married in humble
circumstances, refuses to keep pace with her
husband’s social progress. He is therefore
landed in the arms of Judith Arkroyd, daughter
of Sir Murgatroyd Arkroyd of Royd Hall.
Mrs. Challis, her mind poisoned by a gossiping
friend, deserts her husband, and the outcome
of the passionate situation is made to depend
wholly on the passing of the Deceased Wife’s
Sister Bill, for Marianne Challis was the sister
of his first wife. The dialogues of Challis and
Judith reach the height of improbability for
two lovers about to flout the world for love’s
sake. Here is a specimen, which must be
glossed by saying that “ Titus ” was the in¬
conceivable nickname invented for her lover
by Judith, and that “Mumps ” and “ Chobbles ”
were his two children.

“ ‘ You and Marianne have cried off a compact
Law and Order condemned, while you still

248 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

had a right to do so. Is it credible that the
new Act will tie you together again, willy-
nilly? ’

“ ‘ Dearest, try to see my difficulty. Don’t
think me cowardly or politic; only believe that
it is a difficulty to me, and a serious one.
Suppose us wedded—to-morrow—before the
passing of the Act, anyhow. Suppose that
when it comes it legitimates retrospectively
every marriage that was not acknowledged void
by both parties while it was still an unlawful
one.’

“ Judith withdrew her hand and looked away.
‘ Have you not acknowledged the illegitimacy
of yours ? * she said coldly.

“ ‘ In a sense I have.’ Challis was evidently
flinching under his consciousness of his posi¬
tion.

“ * I do not like “ in a sense,” Titus. Is
Marianne your wife or not? ’

“ ‘ Listen to me, dearest. . . . Think what
it would be for me if at some future time my
two little girls were to suffer from a reproach
their brother does not share, and charge me
with giving my boy a better hold on the world
than they could lay claim to. . . .’

“ ‘ It was their reproach from the begin¬
ning. . . .’

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 249

“ ‘ Yes—yes. But suppose this Act would,
but for me, have conferred legitimacy retro¬
spectively. . . .’

‘“How “but for you”?’

“ ‘ Why—clearly. It might include in its
retrospective action only such marriages as
were held valid by one or the other party at
the date of the passing of the Bill, Mumps and
Chobbles might be legitimate or no, according
to my attitude toward their mother about our
separation. It seems to me that my having
refused to acknowledge it might make all the
difference. . . .’ Challis paused awkwardly.”

But incongruity of incident is not all. The
vulgar, mischief-making Mrs. Eldridge and
her equally vulgar and foolish dupe are admir¬
ably drawn, but Judith Arkroyd—the veriest
novice could tell her for a dummy. Intended
to be the brilliant and fascinating daughter of
a baronet at the end of the nineteenth century,
she is but a reflection of the average Victorian
novelist’s convention for a nymph of the landed
aristocracy—a social caste which was outside
de Morgan’s range of observation. Challis
himself creaks at the joints, but beside the wax-
work figure of his siren he is vitality personified.
The high society characters of When Ghost

250 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Meets Ghost are equally impossible, whether you
look at the earl’s daughter discoursing senten-
tiously to her poet or nod over the middle-aged
wooing of Mr. Pellew and Miss Dickenson,
facetiously commented on by the author with
exquisite tediousness. With the more passion¬
ate emotions, too, William de Morgan was not
at home. His criminals and villains seem to
have no particular motives for their villainy,
and one is glad when their ill deeds are per¬
formed “ off.” Passions, whether of wicked¬
ness or love, did not burn fiercely in the old
times which William de Morgan was recalling.
So far as love was concerned, what figured
there was the romantic attachment of boy and
girl and the tender feeling, ripened by years, of
husband and wife. The two early loves of
Joseph Vance are painted as delicately as rose
petals, but the consuming love that brings pain
with its fiery joys was not within reach of his
imagination. He took the romantic view of
love, and puts it characteristically into the
mouth of kind old Dr. Thorpe :

“ ‘ Love is the golden bead at the bottom of
the Crucible. But love isn’t thought, or per¬
ception, or even passion, in the ordinary sense.
It’s God knows what. I give it up. But it’s

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 251

a breath of fresh air from the highest heaven
brought somehow into the stuffy cellar of our
existence. It’s the flash of light that strikes on
the wall of the tunnel our train is passing
through, and shows us the burst of sunshine that
is coming.’ ”

All his love affairs of young people typify
this view, from the two pretty couples in Alice-
for-Short to the unhappy love of Gracey in
The Old Mari’s Youth. It is all sweet and
fragrant, bright as a blade of grass after rain.
Old people regard it with moist eyes of
approval, and even its unhappiness leaves the
soul unravaged. There were two milieux in
which William de Morgan was thoroughly at
home—that of the not too prosperous middle
class to which he belonged himself and that of
London’s mean streets whose inhabitants he
had studied with constant affection. His
romantic young loves belong to the middle
class, and his domestic attachments—it is curi¬
ous to note—usually to the mean streets.
Middle-class elderly couples in his novels tend
to resolve themselves into a whimsically
philosophical husband who tolerates with chaff
the ill-tempered fussiness of a tiresome Gorgon,
whereas his Christopher Vance is charming

252 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

to his Missus and his Uncle Mo cherishes in
Sapp’s Court his unofficial helpmeet Aunt
Maria. The higher and more devastating
passions he reserves for the aristocracy or for
villains and unsatisfactory snares of middle-
class youth, like the Lavinia Straker of Alice-
for-Short; but the fire is cold and unconvincing,
like one of those fires that burn in grates on
the stage, lurid but obviously sham.

However, when William de Morgan was at
home he was thoroughly installed with every
circumstance of comfort. To read him then
is like paying one of those precious visits of
childhood to a charming elderly relative who
kept special biscuits for tea and, with a certain
twinkling gaiety, treated one gravely as an
equal while showing an intimate sympathy
with one’s immature views. There is an
attractiveness in his whole attitude which is
hardly explicable upon purely aesthetic grounds,
just as there was in our relative’s way of pour¬
ing out tea or peeling an orange. The charm
was all of a piece with the person and the room
he sat in; and William de Morgan’s leisurely
fitting together of a scene, his familiar asides to
his reader, his knowing waggishness, his passion
for children and his pity for age are all of a
piece with the character which, as narrator,

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 253

he so amply reveals—the character of a fatherly,
whimsical, tender, regretful, courageous, and
humble-minded old English gentleman who
believed firmly in the ultimate goodness of
every created thing. If his fascinated readers
sometimes praised his novels extravagantly it
was not surprising, for his personality deserved
the praise, and half the virtue, or more, of his
stories, lies in the personality of their teller.
There was no need to keep his personality
out of the way, for the very reason that he was
remembering rather than creating. He was
not then the potter, struggling with lifeless
clay, but like one who, closing his eyes, sees
immediately a phantasmagoria pass before
them. As he confessed, his characters came
to him, and he waited to see what they would
do. He had only to tell his readers what he
saw and to comment lavishly, as kindly uncles
do, on the stories of the past that they tell by
the fireside. There are times when, with an
almost pathetic earnestness, he calls the reader’s
attention to a particular situation, as if both
author and reader were sitting in the stalls at
somebody else’s play. When, for instance, the
two sisters in When Ghost Meets Ghost , after long
thinking each other dead, draw near in extreme
old age to their mutual recognition, he com-

254 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

ments with tears in his eyes on the pathos of
their position, as if he had been taken for the
first time to see them by his gentle Gwendolen.
We feel, when we most freely surrender to him,
that we are depending, not on the force of his
imagination, but on the clarity of his vision.

When he sees clearly, his people live and his
places become solid before our eyes. No
character lives more splendidly than Christopher
Vance, the father of Joe, who, after his classic
fight with Peter Gunn, founded his fortunes
upon a second-hand signboard that pro¬
claimed him, for the first time, builder. Into
this character William de Morgan put all the
combination of shrewdness and incapability,
the kindliness, the improvidence, the venial
dishonesty and the straightforwardness of
intention which impressed him, after many
years’ study of his own potters, as typical of
the London working man in the ’fifties. Half
the light goes out of the story when Christopher
Vance dies, for his every appearance is rich
comedy. Mr. Vance’s delightful peculiarities
can only be illustrated by reference, so regard¬
less is his creator of space, but it is, perhaps,
permissible to suppose that most readers will
remember such scenes as the “ crocking ” of
the “hinseck,” the buying of the signboard,

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN *55

the first visit to Poplar Villa, the broaching of
Pure Cairn Magorrachan Mountain Dew after
the first Mrs. Vance’s funeral, and the lordly
style in which, at the height of his prosperity,
he outlined his methods of business. Along¬
side of Christopher Vance and his like—Jim
Coupland in Alice-for-Short, Uncle Mo in When
Ghost Meets Ghost, and the odd-job man in
The Old Man's Youth —comes a whole gallery
of London children which certainly Dickens
cannot outdo. William de Morgan loved the
street Arab fiercely and knew the shy, brave
souls of these grubby boys and girls as intimately
as their Cockney accents. The child Joe Vance,
Alice in the dark basement with her drunken
parents, the golden-hearted ragamuffin who
makes a brief appearance in Somehow Good,
Lizarann in It Can Never Happen Again, and
Dave and Dolly in When Ghost Meets Ghost are
all brothers and sisters—one family of their
creator’s affection and pity : and it is signifi¬
cant that one so loth as he to admit real evil
in the world allowed Peggy Heath, one of his
excellent young ladies, musing on the miseries
of Alice’s early life, indignantly to criticise her
Creator.

Peggy herself, Lossie, Janey and all the other
sweet young images of William de Morgan’s

256 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

backward look on female beauty trip through
his novels with dainty steps and roguish faces.
Let him put them in what period he pleases,
they are all sunny ringleted misses of the
eighteen-fifties who are affectionately cheeky
to their fathers and ready to devour any baby
on sight. To imagine them all together is like
seeing the entry of the bridesmaids in the Trial
by Jury , and the men among us, at all events,
like the jurymen, sing mentally, “ Cheer up,
cheer up, we love you.” They nurse infectious
diseases at a moment’s notice and rescue
toddlers from the slums enthusiastically : even
Sally in Somehow Good, who was unusually
pert and slangy, nearly lost her life in rescuing
her unknown father from drowning. Perhaps
they are a little too faultless, a little too much
the old man’s memory of a young man’s dream,
but they are natural none the less, just as their
middle-aged parents—their comedy a trifle
exaggerated—are natural too. Augustus de
Morgan was the original of Dr. Thorpe and all
the other philosophical fathers of families, but
we shall not inquire who were the originals of
his elderly ladies who, unless poor or bedridden,
are fussy and intolerable. Yet they are not
unreal, not half so unreal, for instance, as Mrs.
Jellaby. William de Morgan had an unerring

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 257

touch in portraying the middle-class interior
contemporary with Leech’s drawings, and I
can give no better instance than the breakfast
scene near the opening of Alice-for-Short, where
one by one a prosperous British family of the
’sixties is brought on to the stage.

It must be remarked, however, that his young
men, even Joseph Vance, the best of them, have
less solidity than the young women with whom
they pair. They are never the real heroes of
the story, but play distinctly second fiddle to
the ladies. The paler and more ghostly
character of these pleasant youths is not hard to
explain. They were real ghosts, of the author
himself, and still bound to him by a bit of
emotional ectoplasm. He could not quite
detach them, and they are really at their best
when their ghostliness is most freely recognised
and they are presented, like Joseph Vance, as
looking at themselves with the yearning eyes
of far more elderly beings now lamenting stiff¬
ened limbs and deploring lost opportunities.
Charles Heath, the young man of Alice-for-Short,
by his very objectification exemplifies this
point; for he is only saved from being a thing
of naught by being made the medium for engag¬
ing memories of his author’s early days as an
artist without a vocation.

2 5 8 SOME GREAT ENGLISH- NOVELS

It may be said of William de Morgan’s best
characters that, if they are less lively than
Dickens’, they are more true to life. There is
an almost historical accuracy in their presenta¬
tion which gives them more than an artistic
importance. The same is true of another
character, perhaps his most fondly regarded
of all—the character of mid-nineteenth century
London. There was not a stone of her pave¬
ments that he did not love, and in his affection¬
ate delineation of her alleys, smells, noises, fogs
and familiar voices he has immortalised her
aspect as she stood on the brink of that mechani¬
cal modernity which he lived to deplore. The
whole opening of Joseph Vance, with its dialogue
in the public-house and the fight that followed,
Joe’s ’bus ride to Hampstead, Lossie’s descrip¬
tion of the voyage to Herne Bay, the gloomy
house in whose dingy cellar little Alice crept
shivering, the gorgeous fog effects in Somehow
Good and elsewhere, the Tallack Street of It
Can Never Happen Again , the wistful reminis¬
cences of a countrified Chelsea in The Old
Man's Youth, and, above all, the picture of
Sapp’s Court in When Ghost Meets Ghost are
masterpieces of description in which William
de Morgan rose to his highest level. The
atmosphere and aspect of his boyhood’s London

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 259

had become ingrained in his memory : he
speaks of them with the familiarity of ancient
friendship, and introduces them with a casual
humour and a laugh at their peculiarities that
reveal the depth of his affection.

“It went downhill under the archway when
you did go in, and you came to a step. If you
did not tumble owing to the suddenness and
depth of this step, you came to another; and
were stupefied by reaching the ground four
inches sooner than you expected, and made
conscious that your skeleton had been driven an
equal distance upwards through your system.
Then you could see Sapp’s Court, but under
provocation, from its entry. When you re¬
covered your temper you admitted that it was
a better court than you anticipated.

“ And the residences were in a row on the left,
and there was a dead wall on the right with an
inscription on a stone in it that said the ground
twelve inches beyond belonged to somebody else.
The wall was in the confidence of the main
street, lending itself to a fiction that the houses
therein had gardens or yards behind them.
They hadn’t; but the tenants believed they
had, and hung out chemises and nightgowns
and shorts to dry in the areas they had built

260 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

their faith on; and really, if they were properly
wrung out afore hung up there was nothing to
complain of, because the blacks didn’t hold
on, not to crock, but got shook off or blew away
of theirselves.”

Readers of William de Morgan settle down
luxuriously when they come to such paragraphs,
for his most charming revelations of comic and
lovable humanity are certain sequels to his back¬
ward glances at quaint and friendly London.

The quaint and friendly, indeed, rather than
the passionately beautiful or the tensely
dramatic were the aspects of life which chiefly
lingered in his amiable retrospect. His plots,
of course, abound in incident, accidents,
runnings-over, drownings, gallant rescues, even
murders, but they are all so amply commented
and earnestly elongated with laborious detail
that what magazine editors would now call
their “ punch ” is entirely eliminated. He
could not be dramatic and confessed it. In
the longest and most involved of all his novels
he humbly wrote :

“ I, who write, have no aim in telling this
story beyond that of repeating as clearly and
briefly as may be the bare facts that make it
up—of communicating them to whoever has a

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 261

few hours to spare for the purpose, with the
smallest trouble to himself in the perusal. I
feel often that my lack of skill is spoiling what
might be a good story. That I cannot help;
and I write with the firm conviction that any
effort on my part to arrange those facts in such
order that the tale should show dramatic force,
or startle him with unexpected issues of event,
would only procure derision for its writer,
and might even obscure the only end he has at
heart, that of giving a complete grasp of the
facts, as nearly as may be in the order of their
occurrence.”

So discursive a mind could not rise to the
great moments of conflict and intensity, how¬
ever apt in the accumulation of vivid detail.
One seldom catches his characters in a signifi¬
cant or plastic attitude, and their dialogue,
so natural and racy in the give-and-take of
daily life, falls stiff and dead just when the
imagined scene calls for its quickening. Only
now and then could he put a truly tragic
emotion into appropriate words, and it is but
just, in conclusion, to quote one of these rarities.
It is Aunt Picture’s memory {When Ghost Meets
Ghost) of seeing her husband taken on board
a convict ship long years ago in the Chatham

26a SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

roads. Her neighbour asks if she ever saw her
husband again, and she replies :

“ ‘ Yes. Climbing up the side of the great
ship half-way to the Nore. It was a four hours’
pull for the galley—six oars—each man wrist-
locked to his oar; and each officer with a
musket. But we had a little sail and kept the
pace, though the wind was easterly. Then,
when we reached the ship where she lay, we
went as near as my men dared. And we saw
each one of them—the ten—unhandcuffed to
climb the side, and a cord over the side made
fast to him to give him no chance of death in
the waters—no chance. And then I saw my
husband and knew he saw me. . . . He tried
to call out. But the ship’s officer struck him
a cruel blow upon the mouth, and he was
dragged to the upper deck and hidden from
me. We saw them all aboard, all the ten.
It was the last boatload from the hulk, and all
the yards were manned by now, and the white
sails growing on them. Oh, but she was beauti¬
ful, the great ship in the sunshine. . . . Oh,
but she was beautiful. I’ve dreamed of her
many’s the time since then, with her three
masts straight up against the blue; you could
see them in the water upside down. I could
not find the heart to let my men row away

THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM DE MORGAN 263

and leave her there. I had come to see her
go, and it was a long wait we had. . . . Yes,
it was on towards evening before the breeze
came to move her; and all those hours we
waited. It was money to my men, and they
had a good will to it. . . . Yes, she did move
in the end. I saw the sails flap, and there was
the clink of the ahchor-chain. I’ve dreamt it
again many and many a time, and seen her
take the wind and move, till she was all a mile
away and more. We watched her away with
all aboard of her. And when the wind rose
in the night I was mad to think of her out on
the great sea, and how I should never see him
again. But the time went by, and I did.’ ”

There is nothing in all his novels to rival the
tragic simplicity of this speech : it is significant
that he put it into the lips of a very old woman.
It was the thought of old age which struck the
most poignant emotions from his heart—old
age with all its bright joys faded into a far dis¬
tance and only its regrets in view, clutching
even the memory of deep sorrows as a last warm¬
ing flicker in the dying embers. Youth seemed
to him infinitely enviable, old age infinitely
pathetic. The title of his last fragment might
stand for the inspiration of his whole literary
work —The Old Man's Youth.

X

A LITTLE CLASSIC*

The evanescence of laughter is most pathetic.
Its bubbles vanish from the sparkling wine
that held it so soon after it has been uncorked,
leaving a sadly flat beverage to the critical
palates of future generations. Wit, being a
subtler and less easily disintegrated essence,
does not so quickly pass away, but the buoyant
bubbles of laughter, except in some rare vint¬
ages, survive but a moment the uncorking of
their bottle. We may smile at the things that
aroused the laughter of our ancestors, bringing
our intellect and our imagination to the tast

* Bibliographical Mote .—Principal Works by Edith (E.
Somerville and Martin Ross : An Irish Cousin, 1889;
Naboth's Vineyard, 1891 ; Through Connemara in a Governess
Cart, 1893; The Real Charlotte, 1895; The Silver Fox,
1897; Some Experiences of an Irish R.M 1899; All on
the Irish Shore , 1903 ; Some Irish Yesterdays , 1906; Further
Experiences of an Irish R.M. , 1908; Dan Russell the Fox ,
1911; In Mr. Knox's Country , 1915 ; Irish Memories , 1917;
Mount Music , 1919. All published by Longmans.
Other works have appeared subsequent to the death of
Miss Ross and the writing of this chapter.

264

A LITTLE CLASSIC

265

ing, but it is seldom that we experience spon¬
taneously the “ sudden glory ” of bursting
sides when we read the words which aroused
it. It is almost painful to look through the
files of Punch of some sixty years ago, for it
arouses that agonised shame with which one
witnesses the failure of an inferior joke injudici¬
ously introduced into superior society. One
blushes for its pitiful exposure. Nor is it any
consolation to reflect that the laughter of our
own day will, for the most part, seem like the
cracking of most unsubstantial thorns under
ghostly pots to those who come after us. Very
little of the literature of the past which truly
survives is really provocative of hilarity. The
Falstaffian passages of Shakespeare at once leap
up as if to deny this statement; but, in the first
place, Shakespeare brewed one of those rarer
vintages whose beaded bubbles wink ever at
the brim, and, in the second place, dramatic
literature can always be revived by the fresh
infusion of a living actor’s personality. It is
the purely written word of humour which will
not give that sudden jerk to our emotions
which it gave on its first outpouring. We say
that we can appreciate Rabelais and the comic
tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims ; we profess to
revel in Tristram Shandy, and to find the Pick-

266 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

wick Papers delicious, and we are not wrong;
but it is a soberer enjoyment than that which
these works of art gave to their first audiences.
We pick them up, certainly, when we wish to
be entertained, but seldom when we wish to
laugh. There was a tutor at Oxford—there
may be one still—who was invariably annoyed
when any of his pupils attributed a historical
phenomenon to “ the spirit of the age,”
averring that there was no such thing. But
surely he was wrong in coupling this con¬
venient spirit with the ghosts of Stephen Sly
and old John Naps of Greece, for the peculiar
changes undergone by laughter are there to
prove its existence. Laughter is compounded
of the spirit of the age : it is excited by peculiar
. and irrecoverable felicities and conjunctions of
temperament and environment, all of which
are ingredients in that very real but intangible
spirit. We can guess at this spirit, but we
cannot recapture it, any more than we can
recapture the light effervescence of its laughter.

Further, laughter is not a lofty emotion. The
beasts, they say, have it not, but those who are
little better than beasts laugh heartily. We
ourselves are not so proud of our laughter that
we wish it to echo through the ages, as we
would have our high thoughts ring and our

A LimE CLASSIC

267

tears, perhaps, drip. The heady wine that
moves it is often an unworthy vintage, more
like the champagne which Murger’s Schaunard
christened coco ipileptique than the true Hippo-
crene. So it has been in the past. The shelves
of libraries are full of these flat draughts from
which all the liveliness that alone gave them
savour has departed. Yet in all ages there have
been nobler bins of these light literary wines
which, for all that they no longer catch at the
throat, have a more lasting quality and never
entirely lose their gratefulness to the tongue
of the taster. They may not have sparkled in
their prime more brightly than their now
neglected contemporaries, but they live for
certain finer essences in their composition, wit,
style, finish, colour, bouquet, or something even
subtler than these, that indefinable taste which
distinguishes all that has been grown on a rich
literary soil, warmed by the sun of beauty and
matured by a vintner who has carefully and
lovingly learned his trade. Such, after exciting
the laughter of the present in their youth, may
in their ripeness, and even in their decline,
earn the honour of posterity. They may
possibly be numbered among the classics, that
is to say, among the productions of any age
which deserve to live as models for the future

268 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

or as peculiarly happy expressions of a bygone
time. The test of a classic is what men and
women of any age will always call its modernity,
which means that it possesses some of those
timeless qualities of greatness or artistic excel¬
lence which permeate the spirit of any age.
Skill in construction and delineation, accuracy
of vision, fine rhythm, perfect choice of lan¬
guage, happy adaptation of form to matter,
sense of beauty, all these, like beauty itself, do
not die. The work which holds them, even
though thinly commingled, will outlive the
evaporation of its bubbles, and may by their
preservative effect become, if not a great, at
least a little, classic.

To have done, then, with the bush which no
good wine needs, I would like to taste again,
in the company of the reader, what, if I may
prophesy in hope rather than in certainty, may
become in English literature a little classic of
the future. The bush would not have been so
thick had it not been, on the face of it, unusual
so to greet a work that has moved many
thousands of us to hearty and inextinguishable
laughter. I mean the work of Miss Edith
Somerville and her mourned-for second self in
letters who wrote under the name of Martin
Ross. Few humorists who write merely to

A LITTLE CLASSIC

269

catch the passing fancy of the day can have
been more successful or more popular : in the
merely temporary quality of effervescence they
can compete with any of their contemporaries.
The sportsman who hates art and loathes
poetry has the Irish R.M. and its fellows in well-
thumbed copies on his bookshelves; the man
who only reads for laughter and never for
improvement praises these authors as highly
as the most discriminating, and those who
would faint at the suspicion of becoming in any
way involved in classic literature will joyfully
immerse themselves in “ Somerville and Ross,”
like thirsty bibbers quaffing a curious vintage
for its exhilaration rather than its quality.
Appreciation has poured in upon them from
all sides, from those who know and delight in
the comic sides of Irish life, when treated
observantly and not fantastically, from those
to whom hunting and horseflesh are almost
the be-all and end-all of existence, from those
who treat their brains to a good story as to a
stimulative drug, as well as from those who
bring more discrimination to their appraise¬
ment. The devotees will often claim that they
alone can scent the subtler flavour from these
hilarious pages. The Irishman, unless he be of
the kind that despises all light-heartedness in

270 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

writing of his country, will assert that none but he
can get the exquisite appreciation of comparing
the work of art with the reality which inspired
it : the hunting fraternity will find it hard to
suppose that one who knows not what it is to be

“ Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Chearly rouse the slumbering morn
From the side of some hoar hill,

Through the high wood echoing shrill,”

can possibly enjoy the skill shown by these
authors in describing the joy of horses and the
thrill of hunting. Nevertheless, the books of
Miss Somerville and Martin Ross are heartily
enjoyed by a host of readers who are neither
Irish nor hunting people, for the simple reason
that they are prompted to an explosion of
laughter whenever they take up one of these
stories. The bulk of these readers would wish
to go no further in their appreciation : they
embrace the givers of present laughter with so
full a measure of enjoyment that it would seem
to them unnecessary to probe any further into
the chemistry of such excellence, nor perhaps
would they deem it possible that any higher
praise than their freely-expressed enjoyment
could be looked for by any authors. Yet to
my mind it is possible. While including in
one’s general testimony all that can be said by

A LITTLE CLASSIC

*7*

the most extravagant of these admirers, the
taster who is considering the cellar of English
literature which is being laid down for posterity
may discern qualities not so apparent to the
quaffer for immediate exhilaration. It is hard
to conceive it, but the bubbles may vanish :
if they do, the question is, what will be left?
My point is that the work of Miss Somerville
and Martin Ross has the qualities of a wine
that will keep.

It cannot be a great wine, for the vineyard is
too restricted. The high winds of emotion
have not swept over its soil, nor has the soft
rain of tenderness moistened it. It will always
be bright and rather dry, like Vouvray,* gay
but with a little bite in it : posterity may even
call it “ curious.” But they will recognise that
it holds the authentic flavours that distinguish
infallibly the finer products of English literary
bins. The authors have chosen a small field,
but they direct on it an accuracy of vision which
is remarkable, and, seeing that they were two,
a unity of vision which is a miracle. In the
expression of this vision they display an unfail-

* An anonymous correspondent was much incensed
by this comparison; but he did not know the true
Vouvray. Very few people do; but those who have
had the good fortune to drink it, will see nothing
derogatory in my comparison.

272 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

ing sureness of touch and a precision which
is perfect in its admirable economy. They
handle our language with a deftness and
flexibility which is a rarity in itself, and their
style, though always original, is nourished by a
recollection of great models both in prose and
poetry. Theirs is a literary equipment of the
first class, solidly framed, well clothed, attrac¬
tive in appearance, and ornamented with taste.
They touch nothing that they do not embellish:
events by their unflagging narrative power,
which goes as unfalteringly as one of their
choicest hunters, character by their sympathetic
insight, scenery by their love of natural beauty,
dialogue by their dramatic sense. It is not all
Ireland that they draw, let that be admitted;
they prefer to laugh, letting others weep. Yet,
if the whole heart of Ireland does not beat
within their pages, a part of it is there, pulsing
with true Irish blood and throbbing with truly
Irish emotions. Their aspect is no more that
of Mr. James Joyce or Mr. Synge or Mr. Yeats
than it is that of Mr. George Moore or Mr.
Devlin, but, if they are justly praised for their
merits, that praise cannot be diminished
because they looked on Ireland with laughing
eyes through a West Carbery window. Their
books are literature no less certainly than

A LITTLE CLASSIC 273

Castle Rackrent is literature, and for very similar
reasons.

Well, let us taste. It is a bright dry wine,
I have said. That is not, perhaps, the quality
which the authors would ascribe to what they
consider their best work, The Real Charlotte —
an estimate in which Mr. Stephen Gwynn
agrees with them. This is a fine sombre story
of a middle-aged woman’s jealousy, for Char¬
lotte is a kind of Irish Cousine Bette. But, if
the subject is comparable to that of Balzac’s
novel, the treatment is certainly not so, and
that is my reason for not regarding this as the
work by which their achievement can best be
judged. It is the work in which they have
aimed highest, and the measure of their success
is not small, but the theme of Charlotte’s
jealousy and the havoc in other lives which it
caused needed for its convincing development
all the powers of a great tragic artist. It is
with no want of recognition of the authors’
artistic aims or want of sympathy with their
regret at abandoning them for others less lofty
that this is said; but the work of an artist
can best be judged from that part of it which
most nearly reaches perfection. Miss Somer¬
ville and Martin Ross most nearly reached per¬
fection in their lighter stories of Irish life, and

274 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

it says much for their acumen that they saw
the line on which their talent could naturally
reach its maturity, courageously turning their
backs on higher and more tragic paths likely to
tax them beyond their capabilities. At the
same time, it would be unjust not to point out
that even in their best work comedy does not
exclude the more poignant feelings. It would
be the greatest mistake to regard these two
writers as nothing more than jesters. Their
humour is the true humour which runs hand-
in-hand with pity, and the sympathy mingled
with their laughter robs it of any taste of
bitterness. There is a chapter in Some Irish
Yesterdays which shows how their hearts were
touched.* It treats of marriage and love, death
and birth among the peasantry in the south¬
west of Ireland with a delicacy of feeling which
is beyond praise, and shows that the writers

* In Irish Memories Miss Somerville says that this
chapter is the reprint of an article by Martin Ross—a
fact which throws some light on the respective con¬
tributions of the two collaborators. I should like to
mention another passage in which these writers touch the
pathetic with distinction. It is that chapter in Dan
Russell the Fox in which, while tending a poisoned hound,
the Irish mother tries vainly to persuade her younger
son to propose to the infatuated young lady. He rejects
her suggestion as an outrage on the lady, and sets his
face towards America. As the saved hound licks her
hand, “ It’s no good now, poor puppy,” she says.

A LITTLE CLASSIC 275

did not observe with the aloofness of an explorer
among savages, but that for them seeing and
describing alike were deeply-felt emotional
experiences. The chapter opens with a memory
of a wedding in the little Roman Catholic
chapel of the village, a simple ceremony, after
which the bridegroom hauled his wife up
beside him on to a shaggy horse and started
for home at a lumbering gallop. Then, in a
brilliant transition by way of Tom Cashen’s
reflections on marriage and a glimpse of his
married life, we are introduced at Tom
Cashen’s funeral to the bride of twenty-five
years ago, “ a middle-aged stranger in a frilled
cap and blue cloak, with handsome eyes full of
friendliness,” with her ill-health, her profusion
of children, and “himself” whose “nose
glowed portentously above a rusty grey beard
and beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tint.”
Then listen to the passage which follows :

“ The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March
lived again as she spoke, the glare of the sun¬
shine upon the bare country brimming with
imminent life, the scent of the furze, already
muffling its spikes in bloom, the daffodils hang¬
ing their lamps in shady places. How strangely,
how bleakly different was the life history sum-

2 7 6 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

marised in the melancholy October evening.
Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping
on roads that were white in the sun and haze
of the strong March day, with the large frieze-
clad waist to meet her arms about, and the
laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming
to her ear, there would be a long and miry
tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse,
with talk of guano and geese and pigs’ food,
and a perfect foreknowledge of how he would
complete, at the always convenient shebeen,
the glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the
foundation had been well and duly laid at the
funeral.”

From the funeral we pass again to the cottage
in which “ the Triplets ” are holding their
reception, the three day-old babes cradled in
the stuffy room, hazy with the smoke of the
turf fire, the crowd in the doorway, the old
woman rocking the cradle :

“ Obscure corners harboured obscure masses
that might be family raiment, or beds, or old
women; somewhere among them the jubilant
cry of a hen proclaimed the feat of laying an
egg, in muffled tones that suggested a lurking-
place under a bed. Between the cradle and the
fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat,

A LITTLE CLASSIC

277

motionless in the stupor of his great age;
at his feet a boy wrangled with a woolly puppy
that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed,
in a delicious glance of humour, as it tugged
at the red flannel shirt of its playmate.”

Such a passage in a Russian novelist would
warrant ecstasies on the part of our illuminati:
let us no less highly praise our own art when
it is possible. The chapter concludes with some
lights on the commercial methods of matrimony
practised by the peasant class : the writers
do not defend them, but call attention to the
surprising bloom that is apt to spring from them.
“ From them springs, like a flower from a
dust-heap, the unsullied, uneventful home-
life of Western Ireland.” “ There is here no
material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright;
no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals,
nothing but remarkable common sense, and a
profound awe for the sacrament of Marriage.
Marriage, humorous, commercial, and quite
unlovely, is the first act; the second is mere
preoccupation with an accomplished destiny;
the last is usually twilight and much faithful¬
ness.” The dialogue is a masterpiece through¬
out, epigram, piercing pathos, with humour,
lively and inveterate, lubricating all. Of an

278 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

elderly couple, married by a happy thought
some thirty years before, it was said, as the
authors record, “ their hearts were within
in each other.” This chapter, through which
breathes all the soft beauty and humour of
the soil, is a sufficient answer to those who
would tax these writers with a uniform attitude
of rather heartless derision or with following—
what a blind criticism !—in the benighted foot¬
steps of those who have given us the dreary
horror of the traditional stage Irishman.

Then, again, there is another spirit that
breathes delicately through these stories,
tempering their outlines as the mists of the
Atlantic those of the craggy western hillside.
It is the spirit of natural beauty, which, to the
hearts of Miss Somerville, herself an accom¬
plished draughtsman, and Martin Ross, makes
ever the sharpest appeal. They make the
reader plainly feel that if the unconventional
dignity and penetrating wit of the Irish folk
clutches powerfully at their feelings, the in¬
exhaustible beauty of its surroundings pierces
to their very marrow. Quotation after quota¬
tion might be given to show their remarkable
gift of rendering the scenery which has so
moved their imaginations. I can only choose
a few, embarrassed at the richness of the field

A LITTLE CLASSIC

279

of choice. The last chapter of Some Irish
Yesterdays opens with an example which it is
hard to surpass :

“ The road to Connemara lies white across
the memory, white and very quiet. In that
far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure upon
the spacious country, away to where the Twelve
Pins make a gallant line against the northern
sky. It comes in the heathery wind, it borrows
peace from the white cottage gables on the hill¬
side, it is accented by the creeping approach
of a turf cart, rocking behind its thin grey pony.
Little else stirs, save the ducks that sail on a way-
side pool to the push of their yellow propellers;
away from the road, on a narrow oasis of arable
soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes;
their persistent voices are borne on the breeze
that blows warm over the blossoming boglands
and pink heather.

“ Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of
Irish air; the pureness of bleak mountains is
in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and there
is something more, inseparable from Ireland’s
green and grey landscapes, wrought in with
her bowed and patient cottages, her ragged
walls, and eager rivers, and intelligible only to
the spirit.”

280 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Here is another landscape, the Irish R.M.'s
view of his own demesne :

“ Certainly the view from the roof was worth
coming up to look at. It was rough, heathery
country on one side, with a string of little blue
lakes running like a turquoise necklet round
the base of a firry hill, and patches of pale green
pasture were set amidst the rocks and heather.
A silvery flash behind the undulations of the
hills told where the Atlantic lay in immense
plains of sunlight.”

What, again, could be a more delightful
overture to the lifelike description of the regatta
on Lough Lonen than the short paragraph
which conveys in a few touches all the beauty
of the scene ?

“ A mountain towered steeply up from the
lake’s edge, dark with the sad green of beech
trees in September; fir woods followed the
curve of the shore, and leaned far over the
answering darkness of the water; and above
the trees rose the toppling steepnesses of the hill,
painted with a purple glow of heather. The
lake was about a mile long, and, tumbling from
its farther end, a fierce and narrow river fled

A LITTLE CLASSIC 281

away west to the sea, some four or five miles

off.”

In these descriptions there is no striving for
elaborate effect : the authors simply place the
scene before our eyes with that aptness of
language which is like the unerring needle of a
master etcher. To travel on the wings of Miss
Somerville and Martin Ross gives one constant
thrills of amazement at their hawk-like swoops
after a telling phrase : they catch an apt simile
on the wing with an arresting suddenness which
adds moments of breathlessness to the already
exhilarating flight of their rapid narrative.
Instances can be picked out from any of the
stories like plums from a pudding.

“ In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might
be heard uttering those singular little yelps of
encouragement that to the irreverent suggest a
milkman in his dotage. . .

“ It was a gleaming morning in mid-May,
when everything was young and tense, and thin
and fit to run for its life, like a Derby horse. ...”

“ I followed Dr. Hickey by way of the
window, and so did Miss M’Evoy ; we pooled
our forces, and drew her mamma after us
through the opening of two foot by three

282 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

steadily, as the great god Pan drew pith from
the reed. . .

“ Old McRory had a shadowy and imper¬
ceptible quality that is not unusual in small
fathers of large families; it always struck me
that he understood very thoroughly the privi¬
leges of the neglected, and pursued an un¬
noticed, peaceful and observant path of his
own in the background. I watched him
creep away in his furtive, stupefied manner,
like a partly-chloroformed ferret. . . .”

“ Miss McRory’s reins were clutched in a
looped confusion, that summoned from some
corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan’s
cipher on the Order of the Medjidie.”

“ Like smuts streaming out of a chimney the
followers of the hunt belched from the lane
and spread themselves over the pale green
slopes. . .

Though the temptation is almost irresistible,
I refrain here from displaying this incisive power
applied to character, notably to Irish character.
The success of our authors in this respect is so
notorious that further testimony is superfluous.
If we have any appreciation of their art at all,
the Major and the gentle Philippa, his wife,
Flurry and Sally Knox, old Mrs. Knox looking

A LITTLE CLASSIC 283

as if she had robbed a scarecrow, with her white
woolly dog with sore eyes and a bark like a tin
trumpet, against the inimitable background of
her ramshackle mansion of Aussolas, scene of
many wit-combats between her and Flurry,
Miss Bobbie Bennett, the McRory family,
John Kane, Mrs. Knox’s henchman, and
Michael the huntsman, all are as vivid to us as
our dearest friends. It is worth pointing out,
however, that an almost diabolical power of
delineation is not the only compelling quality
in these portraits. There is in their introduc¬
tion of their characters that natural dramatic
instinct which they have so humorously ob¬
served in their Irish neighbours. I need only
instance the ingenuity by which Mrs. Knox
is first heard “ off,” easily vanquishing in
speech that doughty antagonist, an Irish
countrywoman; or the introduction of John
Kane in “ the Aussolas Martin Cat,” in two
inimitable pages, which are followed by another
perfect passage of comic drama, the entry into
the old demesne of Aussolas of vulgar Mr.
Tebbutts, the would-be tenant:

“ Away near the house the peacock uttered
his defiant screech, a note of exclamation that
seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas; the

284 S0ME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge
with effusion, and from further away the voice
of Mrs. Knox’s Kerry bull, equally instant
in taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath
from growl to yell. Blended with these voices
was another—a man’s voice, in loud harangue,
advancing down the long beech walk to the
kitchen garden. As it approached the wood-
pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted clap¬
pings of wings, from the tall firs by the garden
wall in which they were wont to sit arranging
plans of campaign with regard to the fruit.
We sat in tense silence. The latch of the
garden gate clicked, and the voice said in
stentorian tones :

“ ‘ My father ’e kept a splendid table.’ ”

Every gathering of their countrymen—the
meet, the run, the horse show, the races, the
regatta, the auction—have an intensity of
modon and character which is achieved not
by the tiresome enumerative methods of some
modern realists, but by the skilful selection
of the practised artist, and by a clever conden¬
sation of observations—their only form of
exaggeration—gathered over a wide range of
times and places.

Finally—the word starts up all too soon—

A LITTLE CLASSIC

285

let us praise the powerful sweep of their narra¬
tive, for it is this rapidity and staying power
which sets the crown on their achievement.
When they are out with the hunt, whatever be
the quarry, they are as “ crabbed leppers ”
as ever moved the picturesque admiration of
an Irish hunt following. They are off at the
first cry of the hounds and nothing stops them,
they drop over the slaty fences, change feet
on the banks, thread the rocky paths of steep
ascents and career down the craggy hills, like
Flurry Knox’s mounts to the discomfiture of
staider Saxon hunters. With them, moreover,
there is never a check; they gallop hot on
the scent from first to last, and run the story
to a triumphant death in an ecstasy of un¬
quenchable laughter. Their climaxes are
marvellous, led up to as they are by a brilliant
and sustained crescendo. Think of the miUe
at the end of “ High Tea at McKeown’s,” or
of the “ Dane’s Breechin’,” with its exquisite
interlude of the search for the “ pin ” in the
village post-office; think of the finale to
“ Philippa’s Foxhunt,” with the Irish clergy
and Mrs. Knox pulling the small boy out of the
drain; or of Lady Knox’s ominous arrival at
the end of “ Oh, Love ! Oh, Fire ! ” and the
escape of Sally in Mrs. Knox’s pony-chaise, or

286 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

of the combined catastrophe that fell upon the
Major’s household in “ A Royal Command.”
For pure art in narrative construction these
finales are unsurpassed in English literature
of to-day, all the more because they are free
from buffoonery. Here is one that starts a
movement con brio :

“ A shout from the top of the hill interrupted
the amenities of the check. Flurry was out
of the wood blowing shattering blasts upon his
horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing
the ‘ gone away ’ note that was never blown in
vain. The brown mare came out through the
trees and the undergrowth like a woodcock
down the wind, and jumped across a stream
on to a more than questionable bank; the
hounds splashed and struggled after him, and
as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers
broke forth. In a moment it was full cry,
discordant, beautiful, and soul-stirring, as the
pack spread and sped, and settled into line.”

It is only one of many such. Let me send
the reader to his shelf to take down In Mr.
Knox's Country, and read “ Put Down Two and
Carry One,” with its account of the events
which led to Miss McRory’s riding pillion
behind the Major into the scandalised sight of

A LITTLE CLASSIC

287

Lady Knox, or to expire once more over the
mingling of Mrs. McRory’s golden butterfly
with Philippa’s hat-trimming at the harvest
festival (“The Bosom of the McRorys”). I
am compelled to quote, for its rendering of the
purely ludicrous, from the incident of Play¬
boy’s nocturnal rescue in “ The Conspiracy of
Silence” {Further Experiences of an I.R.M.).
Major Yeates, as deputy master in Flurry
Knox’s absence, has taken the hounds over to
hunt with Mr. Flynn, who, after a run full of
incident, has connived at the secretion of Play¬
boy, a fine hound of the old Irish breed, in a
bedroom at the top of the house. The Major
is warned of this by the youngest boy, whose
gratitude he has earned by giving him a mount
that day. The pair thereupon grope their way
upstairs to raid the bedroom in its owner’s
absence :

“ A dim skylight told that the roof was very
near my head; I extended a groping hand for
the wall, and without any warning found my
fingers closing improbably, awfully, upon a
warm human face.

“ [It was the servant, Maggie Kane, bring¬
ing up a drumstick of a goose to pacify the
hound. They open the door of the room, and

288 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

Playboy is revealed tied to the leg of a low
wooden bedstead.] He was standing up, his
eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as
big as a calf. He obviously regarded himself
as the guardian of Eugene’s bower, and I failed
to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in
point of fact he appeared to be on the verge of
an outburst of suspicion that would waken the
house once and for all. We held a council of
war in whispers that perceptibly increased his
distrust; I think it was Maggie Kane who
suggested that Master Eddy should proffer
him the bone while I unfastened the rope.
The strategy succeeded, almost too well in
fact. Following the alluring drumstick Play¬
boy burst into the passage, towing me after
him on the rope. Still preceded by the light-
footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic
stairs at a speed which was the next thing to a
headlong fall, while Maggie Kane held the
candle at the top. As we stormed past old
Flynn’s door I was aware that the snoring had
ceased, but ‘ the pace was too good to enquire.’
We scrimmaged down the second flight into
the darkness of the hall, fetching up somewhere
near the clock, which, as if to give the alarm,
uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I
think Playboy must have sprung at it, in the

A LITTLE CLASSIC 289

belief that it was the voice of the drumstick;

I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched
from its socket, and that the clock fell with a
crash from the table to the floor, where, by
some malevolence of its machinery, it con¬
tinued to cuckoo with a jocund and implacable
persistence. Something that was not Playboy
bumped against me. The cuckoo’s note
became mysteriously muffled, and a door,
revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open.
We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf
by Playboy’s rope, and in our midst the cuckoo
clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its
protest from under Maggie Kane’s shawl.”

And now, if I may close with a recollection
of what is, perhaps, the most brilliant of all
these brilliant narratives, I will call to the
reader’s mind the story of “ The Pug-nosed
Fox,” from the volume. Every gift

of language, delineation, vigorous intensity,
dramatic gradation, and swiftness of progress
over a series of crises to a perfect culmination
has been lavished by the authors on this story.
From the misguided efforts of the photographer
to take a picture o? the hounds on a sweltering
August day, all through the untimely chase of

the old fox to the discovery of Tomsy Flood
u '

290 SOME GREAT ENGLISH NOVELS

sewn up in a feather mattress in the loft of the
McRorys’ stable, and the raid of the hounds
upon the wedding breakfast at the moment of
the entry of the guests, there is not a moment
in which to draw breath. It is life itself, with
all the added quickness to its revolutions and
intensity to its vision that art can give. With
this memory I must leave this little classic to
its future, but so that art, rather than criticism,
shall have the last word, a typical passage,
showing the authors’ ease of transition from
beauty to comedy, shall close this grateful
appreciation :

“ At the top of the hill we took another pull.
This afforded us a fine view of the Atlantic,
also of the surrounding country and all that was
therein, with, however, the single exception of
the hounds. There was nothing to be heard
save the summery rattle of the reaping-
machine, the Strong and steady rasp of a corn¬
crake, and the growl of a big steamer from a
band of fog that was advancing, ghost-like,
along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields
away a man in a straw hat was slowly combing
down the flanks of a haycock with a wooden
rake, while a black and white cur slept in the
young after-grass beside him. We broke into

A LITTLE CLASSIC

291

their sylvan tranquillity with a heated demand
whether the hounds had passed that way.
Shrill clamour from the dog was at first the
only reply; its owner took off his hat, wiped
his forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.

“ * I’m as deaf as a beetle this three weeks,’
he said, continuing to look us up and down
in a way that made me realise, if possible,
more than before, the absurdity of looking like
a Christmas card in the heat of a summer’s
day.

“‘Did ye see the HOUNDS?’ shouted
Michael, shoving the chestnut up beside him.

“ ‘ It’s the neurology I got,’ continued the
haymaker, ‘ an’ the pain does be whistlin’ out
through me ear till I could mostly run into the
say from it.’

“ ‘ It’s a pity ye wouldn’t,’ said Michael,
whirling Moses round, £ an’ stop in it.’ ”

Printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay & Sons. Limiied,

BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.